Editing palette tools slow

[robincapperw]

Anyone else find editing palette tools slow, right click on a dozen MV Block tools (to set layer key) and it takes a couple of minutes to display the dialog. A few seconds to edit the properties, then another couple of minutes after clicking on OK before you can select the next set.

Even odder, with dwg1 open only ACA is consuming between 5-12GB ram just doing this. That is how I got to 12 being a tolerable number, first selected 20 something and it zoomed up to the full 18GB ram on this machine and never came back. After an hour or so I had to crash out.

Just me?

Robin

ACA 2017 SP1 on HP600Z workstation

[leothebuilder]

Hmmm...I don't have to wait for a dialog to appear when I edit a MVB tool.

And certainly not minutes waiting to edit the next tool.

And using 5-12 meg ram with just dwg1 open I think there is something wrong with your system.

[David_W_Koch]

It might be just you.  I just tried this, and it took about 5 seconds for the Properties dialog to appear with 12 Multi-View Block tools selected at the same time.  Of course, I am likely set up differently than you.  I just i-Dropped twelve MVB tools from the Content Browser onto a local, editable tool palette for my test.

[dbroad]

Robin,

A few questions:  What version of ACA are you using?  Are your palettes stored on a network or on the local machine?  How close to starting up your computer were you when you did the work?  How long had the machine run before a reboot.

I have noticed that time is drawn out just after reboot, after my computer has gone several days or a week without a reboot.  Upgrading drawings and palettes can also play a role.  Background processes like Microsoft Windows search optimization and virus scanning operations also significantly affect things in general.

I hope it was just a quirk for you.

[robincapperw]

Hi

To cover the questions above

• ACA 2017 with all current SP on I7 with 24GB RAM, cold boot, new session of ACA
• Created tools from network located standards dwgs using the Manage > Customisation >  Generate Tool Catalog (from folder). Resulting collection is about 7MB of catalog items (3500 tools) on a network drive
• Copied selected tools to a local palette for editing, all relatively snappy to do
• Editing local pallet slow to display and exit the dialog, changes in the dialog snappy

Note: with only dwg1 open ACA is using 8-16GB of ram while editing these tools (it pulses in time to the edit actions) but very little process or network activity (see screenshot). Very odd. I'm going to try copying the collection to local folder and see if that helps!

[robincapperw]

Copying the catalog to local drive helped, but still uses several GB of ram to edit a few tools. Bizarre considering it is just an xml file!

Robin.

[dbroad]

I agree.  Editing palettes shouldn't require a lot but since ACA is more complex than AutoCAD, it may require more modules to be loaded before editing palettes.

[Victoria.Studley]

Hi @robincapperw,

To add to the suggestions here, have you seen or tried the suggestion in either of these other forum threads?

• Improve Tool Palette Speed
• Slow tool palette response in AutoCAD 2017

They're from the core AutoCAD forum, but there might be something useful for you in them.

[robincapperw]

Thanks @Victoria.Studley, I found the speed was improved by copying the temporary catalog generated by ACA to my local drive. It was only during edit/properties that I had slowness, the final palettes shared from the network are working just fine.

Do find it odd that editing tool palettes consumes vast amounts of ram. The resulting tool catalog is just 2mb of xml, images but editing 12 tools (to set layer key on a MV Block tool) uses 3-5GB of ram. I tried to edit a whole palette full (about 30 tools) and the machine ran out of ram, starting with 24GB available.