Lagging to the point of not being usable

[justinmalinowski]

Hi,

I am using the trial on my iMac 27".

Processor  2.8 GHz Intel Core i7

Memory  16 GB 1067 MHz DDR3

Graphics  ATI Radeon HD 4850 512 MB

Software  OS X 10.9.3 (13D65)

SATA  OWC SSD 3G

I'm finding that everything is very unresposive/laggy. Even simple operations like selecting surfaces, moving selections, zooming and changing aspect are preceeded by a 1-3 second lag.

Unfortunaetly this does make it unworkable for me.

However, I have noticed that the Autodesk sample designs (e.g. Crane Grapple) are far more responsive with 0.5-1 second lag. Not great, but much beter.

I note that Activity Monitior does not display any undue stress on the system, RAM or CPU.

Any suggestions? I do hope that I can sort this out, because I love the Fusion 360 environment (and price structure!).

Kind Regards,

Justin

[joel.palioca]

Hi Justin,

Would you be willing to share your designs with us?  It sounds like some designs that we have already provided are working well, but some of yours are having issues.

You can either upload the files here or share it directly with me via my email below.  This way we can start investigating where the issue may be for you.

Cheers,

[Anonymous]

Hey Justin,

I know this might sound trivial but how often do you restart you mac? I work in IT and often mac users tend to not restart their computers as often.

Here is a quick tip to find out how long your computer has been on:

Go to spotlight search, type in terminal.
click on terminal when it comes up in the search,
once terminal has opened type "uptime" without the quotation marks, then hit enter.

Thats it! terminal will tell you how long your computer has been been on.

If it has been several days, weeks, or months. Give your computer a restart and try fusion 360 again.

The reason I suggest this is because I have a lagging issue as well but only when my mac has been on for a week or longer.

I hope this solves your issue Justin.

Stephan

[justinmalinowski]

Hi Stephan,

Good thinking!

I do a daily full Shutdown as I too have noticed a general degradation in performance practically proportional to the time a computer is left without a restart.

Thanks for taking the time to read and respond to my message.

Cheers,

Justin

[justinmalinowski]

Hi Joel,

Many thanks for you prompt response and offer to look into it for me.

Please find attached the simple test design that demonstrates the issues described. I have not been able to create a new design without the problem and it appears to compound with the addition of each new body.

Please note I am a noob, so I suspect that the solution may be a basic one 😉

Cheers,

Justin 

[joel.palioca]

Hi Justin,

Can you do me a favor and open the file I have attached and let me know if this file runs better?  What I did was I removed the timeline from the model since I noticed a couple of errors in the timeline.

Something else to look at.  Take a look at your graphic effects in the models you are running.  Can you uncheck all of these options and see if that helps with the issues you are having? If not could you upload me images of your current settings for these areas?

Cheers,

[smeggy]

It may or may not apply here but one thing I've noticed is when disk activity is very high it will adversly affect performance on my machines very much as you describe. The monitor doesn't show high CPU activity but it lags like crazy.

[andersbitsch · Accepted solution]

On my desktop it helped turning off the anti-aliasing and on my laptop it helped switching from directx 11 to directx 9 in the preferences/general settings. I don't know if this will help you.

Best regards

Anders

[Anonymous]

Hey Justin,

Just wanted to share a resourceful app I use called istatmenus, it lives up in the status bar on your mac and give read outs of different metrics of your machine. its a paid application, but they offer a 14 day trial I believe. You can use it to see where the bottle-neck is, or at least what metic is topping out so you have a better idea where the issue is. 

http://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus/

[justinmalinowski]

Thank you for your time on this Joel.

It appears that turning off Anti-aliasing was the answer. It now feels like a fully functional program 🙂

[justinmalinowski]

Thank you Anders,

You got it! Turning off anti-aliasing solved this lagging isse instantly.

Thanks you, thank you, thank you!!

 lag

Justin

[joel.palioca]

Glad to hear things are working well for you.

If I may ask, was this performance issue happening prior to the most recent update that happened on June 28th or was it only after?

Cheers,

[justinmalinowski]

Hi Joel,

The performance issue was happening before and after the most recent update.

Kind Regards,

Justin

[thburn]

Hi,

good to hear that switching off anti-aliasing solves the problem. But honestly a 3D application should support anti-aliasing without any problems.

If you go with your car to a garage and you tell them that you have a problem with the motor they don't say:
'switch off the motor, then you don't have problems'.
They try to analyse the problem and also try to solve it. This I expect also from the F360 development team.

The lazy, sluggish behaviour of F360 is well known here and was discussed in the froums many many times.

I really wonder if / when F360 developers wil take this seriously finally and provide a solution.
The PCs and their grafix cards nowadays have enough power to solve those tasks easily. Anti-aliasing is nearly used in all modern software, even simple ones like Word, Excel, etc. use this without any delay.

The F360 developers really should improve the code to make anti-aliasing work properly.

That's my personal opinion.
 

[smeggy]

I just tried DX9 over DX11 and I was quite surprised. It runs faster, smoother and even having AA on seems to make little difference to performance now. It's the first time I've been able to run with AA on and not lag. Nice little tip!

[justinmalinowski]

Hi thburn,

I think you make a valid point. I was surprised ant-aliasing would be such an issue.

[justinmalinowski]

Hi smeggy and andersbitsch,

I don't have the DirectX option in Preferences General. I assume that's because I'm on a Mac.

Are you both on PC?

[andersbitsch]

I am on a PC