AutoCAD LT 2020 running very slow, jittering and spinning blue circle

[OAllington]

Hi,

I have been reading into this for a while online to no avail, I decided to post here instead.

Essentially my AutoCAD LT 2020 is running very slow, when panning and zooming it can be jittery. Actions as simple as changing paperspace layouts, swapping between open drawings, editing text, copying/pasting & changing visibility states of very simple blocks can hold AutoCAD up and present the blue spinning wheel.

My PC specifications are below:

Lenovo P52s

Intel Core i7-8550U @ 1.8GHz (I have never had this drop to it's base frequency, it is always running at 3.5GHz+)

16GB DDR4 SODIMM RAM @ 2400MHz

nVidia P500 Quadro GPU

240GB M.2 storage

Primary (external) monitor for AutoCAD: 2560 x 1440 @ 60

I typically monitor resource usage whilst using AutoCAD and no matter what I'm doing, the following are the highest I see usages:

CPU - ~50%

RAM - ~50% (dependant on how many drawing I have open)

GPU - ~50%

I have attached a screenshot of my graphics config window.

Any help would be appreciated, if you need me to screenshot anything else or explain anything let me know.

Thanks!

Oli

[pendean]

What version of AutoCAD/LT used to run on this laptop?
Blue-spinning icon is Windows asking you to wait while it juggles your apps: that's a very small primary drive, how much room do you have left on it?
Where are your files stored and how are you connected to that source? They are not on that tiny HD.

Have you reset LT2020 yet? Probably would not hurt to remove any added content.
Have you turned off LINEFADING and LINESMOOTHING variables yet?
Have you turned off hardware acceleration in GRAPHICSCONFIG command yet?

[OAllington]

Thanks for the response. See below

What version of AutoCAD/LT used to run on this laptop? LT 2019 used to run on this laptop.
Blue-spinning icon is Windows asking you to wait while it juggles your apps: that's a very small primary drive, how much room do you have left on it? I have just under 100GB left on the drive, its a work laptop so really isn't heavily populated with software and files.
Where are your files stored and how are you connected to that source? They are not on that tiny HD. The files are on a central networked server, I am connected to it via hardwired LAN. There are others in my department connected to the same server in the same way and their machines do not have such issues.

Have you reset LT2020 yet? Probably would not hurt to remove any added content. What do you mean by reset LT2020? I ported over all the user preferences from LT2019 when I changed, including drawing templates, CUI files, tool palettes etc.
Have you turned off LINEFADING and LINESMOOTHING variables yet? Yes, these were and are both turned off.
Have you turned off hardware acceleration in GRAPHICSCONFIG command yet? I have tried with and without hardware acceleration, both perform pretty much identically other than that when it is turned off, the crosshairs flicker when moving.

Also, I just tried a restart of my machine and it has sped up, but this is a problem that I know for a fact will come back, it does occasionally run smoothly and everything works well. But more often than not it is plagued with slow downs.

[pendean]

"Occasionally runs smoothly/restarting fixes the problem" tends to point to your system running or launching something in the background, or the new LT2020 is not releasing memory. You can fix the former by shutting down unnecessary background and active apps to see if that helps. For the latter, Autodesk has yet to issue anything to address the problem so you are pretty much out of luck for the next week/month/months when they get around to issue fixes.
You should report this to Autodesk yourself here https://knowledge.autodesk.com/contact-support/using-my-product

Reset is done like this if you still wish to explore it https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/autocad/troubleshooting/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/How-to...

[dtarch2012]

Hi,

I've been having similar problems with AutoCAD 2020 LT.  It worked well when it was first installed.  But after a few weeks of use, the program started to lag (spinning blue circle) after every command.  It got so bad that I went back to using the 2019 version until I found a fix.  Today I read in another thread a comment about how migrating settings from previous versions can cause problems.   When I installed 2020, I had migrated my Workspace settings from the 2019 version.  So today, I set the Workspace to  "Drafting & Annotation".  (this might be the default Workspace?) When I did that, it removed the migrated Workspaces.  It didn't solve the lag problem either.  So I once again migrated my 2019 Workspace into 2020.  After that, the command lag is gone.  The program is now working just fine. 

Hope that helps....

D

[pendean]

Simply changing workspaces is never a fix for this type of problem: resetting the software is best if the problem isn't actually somethig else like the need to turn off hardware acceleration https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/autocad/troubleshooting/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/How-to...

[dtarch2012]

Hi Pendean, 

In my case, the only thing I did was to change my Workspace from the migrated 2019 version to the default Drafting & Annotation 2020 version and then re-migrated the 2019 version back into 2020 using the Migrate From a Previous Version utility.  As soon as I did that, the command lag went away.  I didn't make any other changes to the software or hardware.  I had previously tried other suggestions such as turning off hardware acceleration / graphicsconfig but it did not stop the command lag.

D

[llocilento]

I'm in the same boat. The little blue circle is killing my ability to move quickly while drafting...hatching, viewports almost every command and I get a blue spinning wheel cursor for 15-30 seconds...I've had AutoCAD LT for nearly 5 years and 2019 has been the worst year for this issue. I work remotely and I access a network from an office...I open files and all Xrefs are orphaned or not found...but if I'm in the office the xref's are completely fine. I'm not very technical. I cannot speak to how much memory is being used but I'm constantly trying to resolve these issues...it's eating up so much necessary production time on drafting deadlines. I'm going to upload 2020 today. but after reading this...I'm concerned this issues will continue. 

[pendean]

The OP above posted their fix for their issue: read their last post again to pitfalls you can avoid.

BUT... Windows' blue circle is your OS pausing the program while it resolves a system timing issue: since you mentioned you work remotely, have you and your I.T. worked together to identify any latency issues you might be experiencing? That's most likely contributing to your orphaned Xrefs and the other items you note.

You probably need to start your own thread/original post: this is not a "me too" problem here.