Not Responding, please show background activity

[Neil_Cross]

Anyone who has worked in a large drawing office, on large assemblies, which have been worked on by a large variation of people with a large variation of skills, will have sat and watched the spinny circle of doom for minutes and minutes on end.  Go grab a coffee, it might be done before you get back.  

It's a daily occurence in my current office, whether it be:

Waiting 10 minutes for an Assembly to open:

Waiting a good few minutes for Inventor to compute an edit to a drawing view:

Waiting a couple of minutes for Inventor to calculate mass properties:

Or my biggest problem, waiting a lifetime for it to perform a geomtery update on an assembly:

The reasons for the delays are probably avoidable, bad modelling, released and/or locked files causing a hold up, large derived parts taking a while to compute, complex calculations on specific files etc etc but the problem is it's a mystery, there's no visual feedback for what it's doing.

Tell me which ones! I honestly don't mind waiting 10 minutes to update a model, if Inventor told me which specific child parts are causing the delay.

I'd like to suggest a progress bar, similar to Vault's Get/Checkout progress bar, show me which files it's processing during these extensive periods of Not Responding downtime.  

If I can visually see which file(s) are causing the extended periods of downtime, I can then target them individually and investigate those files.

This would also increase user confidence in the application.  If they're sat waiting 20 minutes for an Assembly to open, rather than have them assume their PC is rubbish or Inventor is slow today, if they could see that actually it's a 300mb derived part being pulled over the network or it's currently stuck opening a complex IPT which they had bother with yesterday, it gives them feedback and info which is infinitely more useful than sitting looking at a not responding spinny circle of doom 

[RolfEven]

I want to give this idea a massive monster Kudo, instead of my standard single measely one 😉

Good idea!

/Rolf Even

[jyager]

My biggest problem is some models I have reference geometry in...it takes FOREVER to do the trimming it does of that geometry in .idw/.dwg views...making the view "exact". I literally have zero idea if it'll be five minutes or five hours. I found that by sending it to print, I'll get a prompt asking if I want to wait for the drawing views to finish, if I click yes...THEN I get a progress bar.

Stumbled on that one out of frustration one day.

[steve.west]

Yes. A heads-up would be nice. That way we can see what's causing the delay and investigate further.

[pdecker]

Also, while loading a large file, there will be numerous dialog boxes that come up asking things such as "check out" or "replace..." that if you're not there to answer, the loading process is stalled. This means you can't just walk away for a half an hour to do something else while you wait. I find it humorous that Autodesk thinks 1000 pieces is a large assembly; we have one with about 100,000 pieces (probably 2000 or so unique)!

[DRoam]

Loosely related to this is this request: Assembly Update...better controls? (Essentially, selective update--allow us to see which components need updating and choose which to update or not)

[VeronicaSmith5891]

Completely agree. Sometimes I wait, wondering if it's just doing its calculations or has it really locked up and I've wasted my time waiting. At my office we've nicknamed that spinning circle "hynotoad" and when the screen goes fuzzy white we call it "death fog". But we've learned that when the screen goes to death fog it might not actually be locked up. A way to tell either way would be very helpful.

[3D4Play]

Ditto what RolfEven said!

[m.minajev]

Good idea to increase performance.

[danunnez]

Sound like some kind of part/assembly performance evaluation tool. Sounds great!