topic Re: A request for Fusion 360 developers at Autodesk in Fusion Support Forum

Long wait opening or saving files.

Frans.Hessels — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 11:08:53 GMT

Waiting for 15 minutes to open a file makes me ask all you developers of Fusion 360 to make it possible to store and open my files at my workstation.

Fusion 360 is fine software (payed licensed user) to work with but I am fed up with the long waiting times to open and store my (component heavy) files.

Opening a file should not take longer then a few seconds and saving a file shouldn't take ten or more minutes in which no other action can be taken at my workstation to prevent Fusion 360 to go in not respond modus.

[ Post title modified for clarity - by moderator ]

Re: A request for Fusion 360 developers at Autodesk

TrippyLighting — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 18:33:02 GMT

That's a fine request, but it implies that all or many users are facing this problem. While this does come up here on the forum and other places, it isn't that often that it would indicate a widespread problem for a large number of users.

For example, I don't experience this at all.

I often work with designs with several thousand components and loading and saving never takes anywhere close to 10, or even 5 minutes.

Here's a component count on a current project.

A such there is probably more information needed to assess your specific situation.

Re: A request for Fusion 360 developers at Autodesk

Frans.Hessels — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 19:22:56 GMT

When making changes to a small file - three components - by adding five components to it and opening the top file - in this case an airplane fuselage - it's like the fuselage is surging the small component, sees it has changed and is slowed down in opening or in a worst case scenario not even opens but let Fusion crass and shut down.

All files in the wright sequence have to be opened, updated and saved before the top file can open normally. Then again Fusion reports frequently it is not responding. The wheel runs, left side menu's turn black, appear again, the green timeline at the right bottom side flows, stops, etc. This can take several minutes up to twenty.

My workstation runs Autocad, 3ds max, Revit, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. without any problem. It is connected to a fiberglass network and has a NVidia Quadro P5000 videocard and SSD C:

But I understand because you don't experience this problem I simply have to life with it. Nice. Will do.

Re: A request for Fusion 360 developers at Autodesk

TrippyLighting — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 20:00:41 GMT

@Frans.Hessels wrote:

But I understand because you don't experience this problem I simply have to life with it. Nice. Will do.

No, you have very clearly misinterpreted what I said!

Lets try again:

How about access to the model(s) and perhaps a screencast to explain the situation?

Re: A request for Fusion 360 developers at Autodesk

jeff_strater — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 20:38:04 GMT

@Frans.Hessels - I doubt that the delay is related just to the cloud storage. Yes, there can be a delay in downloading a design the first time it is opened, but after that, on the same machine, the design is cached locally, and is opened from cache (unless you clear your cache), in which case, it is mostly an open-from-local-hard-drive anyway. It is hard to tell without the design itself, but if I were to bet, I would bet that any delay has to do with the design itself, not the cloud storage. If your design is all self-contained (no external references), you can even test this yourself by downloading the design, and using the "open from my computer" option on the Open command, you can see what the time is for local open.

The number of components can have some effect, but often it is not the number of components, but the model in each component. You mentioned an airplane fuselage. How detailed is this model? If you save out only that component, how large is that design? I suspect that this is a very large design that will take time to read in, and expecting it to read in "in a few seconds" is probably unrealistic, no matter what CAD application you are using.

There could well be some other effect going on, but, as @TrippyLighting says, without the design, it is just speculation.

Re: A request for Fusion 360 developers at Autodesk

Frans.Hessels — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 09:49:56 GMT

The design is not self-contained. It's an airplane scale 1:1 with ever increasing detailing. First the overall shape was made and now al parts are being drawn 2D to open them as dwg in AutoCAD, published after this in pdf format and finished in Illustrator.

Today I opened the model after starting Fusion and it took 4 minutes to open. An other 1 minute to update and a minute to save it.

So I recalled what was done yesterday when Fusion was slow. I added some components to a file of the lowest level. A pulley assembly file. Exported it in step format by using the file dropdown menu export option and a second time by direct selecting the filename at the top of the browser.

Then I opened the Fuselage extended file without first opening the linked file of which the pulley assembly is linked to. Then the waiting began. Here is a link to my airplane file: https://a360.co/3fw2Cqc

To keep my workstation clean I always first clean cache data and then sign out.

Re: A request for Fusion 360 developers at Autodesk

Frans.Hessels — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 09:55:31 GMT

please see my answer to Jeff Strater

Re: A request for Fusion 360 developers at Autodesk

jeff_strater — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 02:14:54 GMT

@Frans.Hessels - this design is 4.13GB on disk when downloaded. That is a very large design. There are, as you indicated, lots and lots of external components. And, some components are very large, as well. It is not surprising to me that it takes many minutes to open. Expecting that any CAD application can open a design of this size "in seconds" is, in my opinion, unrealistic. I still believe that download is a relatively small part of the time spent opening. You can do this timing yourself: Do a "cold open" by clearing the cache and opening the design. Time the results. Then, close Fusion, do not clear the cache, start Fusion again, and do a "warm open". This is a local open. My guess is that the time will be similar. You can even try another experiment, and mark this design for offline access, then switching to offline mode once Fusion is open, and opening the design, to clearly eliminate any internet traffic.

All of this is based on your original request: "makes me ask all you developers of Fusion 360 to make it possible to store and open my files at my workstation". I do not believe, even if we did make this possible, that you would be able to open 4GB of data in seconds.

Re: A request for Fusion 360 developers at Autodesk

Frans.Hessels — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 14:34:35 GMT

Jeff Strater thank you for your repley. I know it's a big file and in the future it will become even bigger. Details will be added to get a complete picture. To be sure I want to say that I love working with Fusion 360.

When a Fuselage is opened and I open an other file fi an other model also using the Fuselage the second model is opened in 10-20 seconds. So I learned myself to leaf a big model open to speed up opening other parts.

I clear the cache because I experienced twice that the C: drive of my workstation was filled completely with data so I got warned my workstation would stop working. Every time I did a clean installation of Fusion I got around 240 GB of free space back on it.

Can it be done the cache files are stored on my 😧 drive of 2TB? There's 1.6 TB of free space on it.

I also work with Illustrator and Photoshop a lot. You will know that Adobe would like to see my files in the cloud but all my files I store at my workstation on the 😧 drive. It would be nice if Fusion 360 would offer the possibility to choose the place where the files to be opened are stored, in the cloud or on my own workstation.

Working with Fusion 360 for nearly six years know I only used it three times to grant a client excess to a file. These days my clients are happy to receive pdf files and eps or dwg format.

Re: A request for Fusion 360 developers at Autodesk

TrippyLighting — Sat, 05 Nov 2022 01:23:43 GMT

I uploaded the file and it took a little eternity. However, that was expected.

After upload, opening the overall assembly took les than 2 minutes on my home PC:

AMD Ryzen 5950X with a base clock of 3.4GHz and max boost lock of 4.9GHz.

64GB of DDR4 RAM

Then I opened it on 2017 my MacBook Pro and it took 9'50".

This is a Intel Q7uadcore i7 at 3.1GHz but only 16GB. I say only, because with this model Fusion 360 uses an obscene amount of memory, causing it to swap memory out to SSD. Very time consuming!

Then I remoted into my Work Computer where it took 5'40" tom open:

Dell Latitude Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-10850H CPU @ 2.70GHz 2.71 GHz (6 physical cores)

32GB memory.

when looking at overall memory consumption, keep in mind that I had not shut this down after a day of work and a number of applications open. Still memory consumption of Fusion 360 with this model is pretty large!

So, in essence, machine specs can have significant impact on how fast this loads. I would definitely check out memory consumption in the Windows resource monitor and see if a memory upgrade to 64GB is needed.

Re: A request for Fusion 360 developers at Autodesk

Frans.Hessels — Sat, 05 Nov 2022 19:35:43 GMT

These are the specs of my workstation: Maqina Workstation, processor Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2630 V3 @ 2.40 GHz (2 processors) Installed RAM 32,0 GB (31,9 GB usable), Windows 10 Pro 64-bit. Nvidia Quadro P5000, 2560 CUDA Cores, graphics memory 32117 MB. Internet glass fiber. C = SSD 0,5 TB, D = 2 TB.

First of all I didn't realize the file was that big. OK, I knew it was big but this size... Tried to find it in my directory's of Fusion but couldn't find it anywhere. Maybe I surged wrong.

The model I am building as a volunteer in a group of people who are interested in preserving the history of the former MLD (Marine Luchtvaart Dienst) Marine Airforce of the Netherlands. It's the only model I am working on having this size. And I agree with you and Jeff Strater, now aware of its size, downloading and opening it in seconds is impossible.

The normal models I use Fusion 360 to model are downloaded and opened very fast. That said, the airplane after it is loaded and opened poses no problem to be edit.

Re: Long wait opening or saving files.

Steven_Gao — Wed, 09 Nov 2022 09:36:12 GMT

Thanks for sharing the dataset! I have forwarded this dataset to our performance development team. They will do some further investigation of it and to see whether there is any improvement of opening this large size file.

Thanks,

Steven