topic Re: FlexSim get slower and slower during the day until I reopen Quick Properties in FlexSim Forum

FlexSim get slower and slower during the day until I reopen Quick Properties

patrickABAWF — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 19:09:01 GMT

[ FlexSim 23.0.2 ]

Hello, I've noticed that FlexSim gets slower and slower during the day while I'm working on the same model. Things become more and more slow to select, open, move, etc.

I becomes noticable after 1-2 hours and becomes worse and worse until I close and restart FlexSim.

And all I have to do to fix this is close and restart FlexSim and all is back to super fast.

It does that no matter what model type or size I'm working on.

Could it be something with my graphics card that accumulates junk and then deletes it when I close FlexSim?

Anyone else notice this? Is it normal?

Re: FlexSim get slower and slower during the day until I reopen Quick Properties

jason_lightfoot_adsk — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 22:45:54 GMT

Have you tried closing and reopening the (quick) properties panel? Does that rectify the issue?

Re: FlexSim get slower and slower during the day until I reopen Quick Properties

patrickABAWF — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 22:58:50 GMT

It seems to be fixing it but I recently restarted FlexSim so not sure. Have to leave for the week-end. I will test for real Monday.

Re: FlexSim get slower and slower during the day until I reopen Quick Properties

joerg_vogel_HsH — Sat, 21 Jan 2023 06:56:02 GMT

The undo feature collects data to recover previous states of a model. Can you document relevant states like memory consumption and cpu usage from the task manager of windows system while you work?

Re: FlexSim get slower and slower during the day until I reopen Quick Properties

patrickABAWF — Tue, 24 Jan 2023 14:04:23 GMT

I made print screens of the Windows Task Manager performance graphs and there is no difference for any component (CPU, GPU, RAM, etc) between when I start FlexSim and after 2 hours of working with it.

Re: FlexSim get slower and slower during the day until I reopen Quick Properties

Jeanette_Fullmer — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 19:04:56 GMT

Hello @Patrick Cloutier, Were you able to test Jason's suggestion?

Re: FlexSim get slower and slower during the day until I reopen Quick Properties

patrickABAWF — Tue, 31 Jan 2023 13:43:35 GMT

Not well enough to be convinced that it is the solution so that's why I didn't approve the answer yet.

Re: FlexSim get slower and slower during the day until I reopen Quick Properties

Jeanette_Fullmer — Tue, 31 Jan 2023 18:18:00 GMT

Hello @Patrick Cloutier,

I asked some of the consultants if they experience the issue you described. They mentioned that the properties window gets slow, so it helps to close it and just reopen it. The development team did not have any more input about this without the ability to more directly identify what is causing the issue.

Re: FlexSim get slower and slower during the day until I reopen Quick Properties

Jeanette_Fullmer — Fri, 03 Feb 2023 21:32:25 GMT

Hi @Patrick Cloutier,

We haven't heard back from you. Were you able to solve your problem? If so, please add and accept an answer to let others know the solution. Or please respond to the previous comment so that we can continue to help you.

If we don't hear back in the next 3 business days, we'll assume you were able to solve your problem and we'll close this case in our tracker. You can always comment back at any time to reopen your question, or you can contact your local FlexSim distributor for phone or email help.

Re: FlexSim get slower and slower during the day until I reopen Quick Properties

patrickABAWF — Sat, 04 Feb 2023 13:04:52 GMT

I am the local distributor...

Re: FlexSim get slower and slower during the day until I reopen Quick Properties

patrickABAWF — Sat, 04 Feb 2023 13:05:49 GMT

I accepted this answer because I don't want to leave the post open but the solution is not conclusive. Thanks Jason.

Re: FlexSim get slower and slower during the day until I reopen Quick Properties

jason_lightfoot_adsk — Sat, 04 Feb 2023 16:03:01 GMT

Understood - in the past the Properties panel could definitely slow things down but it seems it's much better in the current versions. The other thing you could try if/when it next happens is to reopen the default workspace - if that helps then let us know so we can alert someone to the fact (or you can email in directly of course).

Re: FlexSim get slower and slower during the day until I reopen Quick Properties

Jeanette_Fullmer — Mon, 06 Feb 2023 21:10:27 GMT

Sorry about that. It is an automatically populated response. I should have edited it before sending it.

Re: FlexSim get slower and slower during the day until I reopen Quick Properties

patrickABAWF — Wed, 08 Feb 2023 22:36:15 GMT

I now confirm without a doubt that closing/reopening the Properties panel solves the problem,

Re: FlexSim get slower and slower during the day until I reopen Quick Properties

patrickABAWF — Thu, 09 Feb 2023 19:25:20 GMT

But is this issue the same for everyone? Or is it something specific to my computer/set-up?

Re: FlexSim get slower and slower during the day until I reopen Quick Properties

philboboADSK — Thu, 09 Feb 2023 21:17:20 GMT

It is the result of the way Quick Properties is designed. The issue isn't your particular computer/setup, but the scale of the impact will depend on your system configuration and how you use the software throughout the day.

The Quick Properties window has hundreds of panels for the various objects. When you click on an object of a particular type, then the panels that are relevant to that type are generated and displayed. The first time you click on an certain type of object (a Staff member, for example), it will be slow to initially generate those views in those panels. When you click away to another object, it hides any panels that it has already generated so that if you click back to an object with panels that have already been loaded, they can be quickly un-hidden instead of slowly re-created. (Try closing and reopening Quick Properties and testing clicking on Staff > 3D background > Staff to see that the second time clicking the Staff will be much faster than the first.) Eventually, if you've clicked on many different types of objects, then you will have generated tons of different panels, and any view-traversing operations (such as refreshing, resizing, or repainting those views) will generally be slower, depending on the power of your system. Closing and reopening the Quick Properties view causes it to clear the cache of windows it has created and start over regenerating them and recaching them.

It's all performance trade-offs. For most usage, the cache makes the program generally faster because the pre-loaded panels will open faster on subsequent usage. Once you've opened and cached tons of them though from many different object types, then certain other operations will become slower. So we're trading high performance for most of the day for lower performance later if you've left the window open for hours and hours on end, which you can easily resolve by closing and reopening the view to clear its cache. Knowing precisely the point in time when that lower performance will hit is dependent on the model, the user, and the system. There's not a simple way for us to programatically detect at what point the overall slow-down is costing more than the performance cache speed-ups to somehow clear the cache for you. Adding any kind of code to automatically do that would slow everything down even more with those calculations, which would be counter-productive.

We have no plans to change this system. This is the result of moving everything from their own top-level dialog windows into the Quick Properties panel, which has been a massive ease-of-use and productivity boost for our users.

Re: FlexSim get slower and slower during the day until I reopen Quick Properties

patrickABAWF — Thu, 09 Feb 2023 22:04:21 GMT

Thanks Phil for the explanations.

It has been an issue for me for a few years but now that I understand the reason and the fix, it's easy to live with.