Multiple problems with Autocad 2012 and 2013 - Poor perfomance

[noodle591]

Hi all,

We seem to have loads of problems with both Autocad 2012 and 2013.

We are using a Macbook Pro 15'' - 2.2GHz i7, 8GB RAM and Radeon HD 6750 1024MB, running Lion 10.7.4

These are the main problems we have:

- Autocad process running at 100% but the actual CPU is not even using 20%

- Freezes for about 10/20 mins when coping a section

- Hatch errors saying it's out of the limit

- when filling in a rectangle or an area, it will freeze again for another 10 mins

We have tried this with new documents and tried to copy existing documents to a new one thinking the problem was the document. Also we have uninstalled Autocad2012 and installed it clean and nothing. And now installed 2013and we are having the same performance problems.

DRAGP1 is already set to 5000 and I have already reset many times the com.autodesk.AutoCAD.savedState

Could you please advise how to fix these? We are working on loads of final year project work, and it's impossible because it stops to "think" sooo often....

Thanks

[maxim_k]

Hi,

As I see most of your problems related to the hatch creation process, which is extremely processor consuming (in AutoCAD for Windows too).

So, please, take a look at this tip:

AutoCAD Tip of the Day – Hatch Boundary Selection Optimization

Hope it will be useful for you.

Maxim

[noodle591]

Thanks for that maxim_k.

Any ideas about the perfomance problems? I mean, is Autocad made to not even use 20% of my CPU nor memory but still make us wait to draw something?

It seems a bit of a waste, no matter how fast your mac is, Autocad will still pick up very little resources and make  you wait forever

[maxim_k]

Hi,

Do you have external references in your drawing(s)?

Do you open files locally or from server?

What do you mean by "still make us wait to draw something"? You have to wait after you cal some command, or wait for command result?

Do you have some PROXY objects in your drawings (objects created in 3-rd parity applications for those AutoCAD haven't support)

I see a lot of hatch (AR-SAND pattern?), surrounding trees (I think blocks) in your screenshot. Have you tried to draw/edit something in your drawing without this hatch (temporary delete hatch from drawing)?

Maxim

[noodle591]

Hi Maxim,

In answer to your questions:

- Do you have external references in your drawing(s)? No, it's all on the same file

- Do you open files locally or from server? - All locally

- What do you mean by "still make us wait to draw something"? You have to wait after you cal some command, or wait for command result? - We wait for command result

- Do you have some PROXY objects in your drawings (objects created in 3-rd parity applications for those AutoCAD haven't support) - No PROXY objects

I see a lot of hatch (AR-SAND pattern?), surrounding trees (I think blocks) in your screenshot. Have you tried to draw/edit something in your drawing without this hatch (temporary delete hatch from drawing)? - We have tried with different files, different designs, trees and no trees and it makes no difference. It happens on all files we have, and also the files are not necessarily huge in GBs.

From the tips link that you sent me, we have tried various things:

- Opened a different file than the "trees" one. Zoom into an area with nothing around it or with less content. Created a rectangular and filled it in. This was no problem, it was processed right away.

- Zoom out showing a few things of the design, try the same rectangle and fill it in. It froze (see screenshot below). The blue filled one, is the first step we did, zooming in. The empty one is the one being processed at the moment, making the Autocad to hang

- We dont have any Z pointers and all boundaries are closed.

Even zooming in a bit more, we tried to create a third rectangular and it hanged again.

What kinda concerns me, is that the CPU and memory and doing very little, but still Autocad takes forever to process the commands.

Also when selecting an area to cut it, it also hangs like this.

Thanks for your help

[noodle591]

Oh also, the Autocad process seems to run at 100% CPU, but the CPU is not at 100% (only 20%) which could imply that the actual program is not properly designed to deal with multicore, multi-thread and its like running the program on an old computer (so pointless expending much money on a new laptop/desktop when the program runs like on a 386)

Once again, thanks for your help

[maxim_k]

Hi,

Can not say anything about using memory and processor resources by AutoCAD itself, but can suppose, that the real case of delays could be in dealing AutoCAD with Graphics system of the Mac (video card) via hardware accelerated driver (the only available in AC for Mac, in Windows we have also software driver).

Could you send me (mkanaev at yandex.ru) the files, that I can see on screenshots. I'll try to test them on my system, maybe I will find some pitfalls.

Maxim

[dgorsman]

I can comment on some of those.  AutoCAD isn't very multi-threaded and trying to <Picard>make it so!</Picard> won't make things run much faster as many of the common drafting tasks are very linear in fashion.  Step A must be completed before Step B can be started, the same with Step C, and so on.  They simply cannot be done at the same time which is why multi-threaded programs can finish complex problems much more quickly than a brute-force linear approach.

It's like several people going grocery shopping.  You can choose which people go down which aisle and in which order, but if person A doesn't know that person B is buying steak for the BBQ they can't know whether to get steak sauce or pasta sauce.  And everybody still has to line up at the cashier.

[noodle591]

Hello

First, thank you both for trying to help.

My sister had more issues this morning.

She went to select part of the document to delete unwanted stuff and before she had even finished selecting the area, Autocad had already crashed. I told her to wait for it to process and then she got the second error.

The file then got corrupted but luckily she managed to recover it on Windows.

The same task (select and delete) on Windows didnt even last 10 mins... so is multi-threading working there?

It seems that any task (even the hatching ones mentioned before) can be done in Windows in seconds and on a faster Mac will take forever.

Not really sure how we can improve this

Thanks again

[maxim_k]

Hi,

It appears that you have unique files

If you can not send example of them to me (or post here), could you just say: how many spline objects do you have in your drawings? And how they defined: with fit points or with control vertices?

Maxim

[Peter_Rijs]

Hi "Noodle591",

Exact same problem here: AutoCad 2013 "not responding", CPU does not get over 15% usage, only 25% of memory (4 out of 16Gb) used.

Have you solved the problem - and how . . ?

regards,

Peter

Intel Core i7-3820 CPU @3.6GHz

16Gb RAM of which 15.2 usable

240Gb SSD + 3000Gb HDD (software on SSD)

Win 7 Pro 64bit SP1

NVIDIA Quadro 4000, dedicated video memory 2048MB GDDR5, shared system memory 3430MB

ASUS Motherboard P9X79 DeLuxe, BIOS version 2104