Blue Spinning circles - Civil 3D not responding

[neilyj666]

This seems to be happening more often recently - all of a sudden Civil 3D becomes unresponsive and the crosshair cursor can't be seen and nothing can be selected. Hovering over the C3D icon in the taskbar shows the below  blue spinning circles and the task manager shows acad.exe as "not responding"

 

Whilst I can kill the process, I have no idea how much work I'll lose as I don't know what will be saved in the recovery file.

This is very annoying behaviour which I can't reproduce on demand - any one else having similar issues?

[AllenJessup]

I've seen it. I think anyone who has run Civil 3D for any length of time has seen it. I've never found a way out other than End Task.

[neilyj666]

After the  End Task, I restarted and recovered the file but even though I have set the autosave to 10 minutes there wasn't an autosaved file available within the previous 30 minutes so I had  a lot of rework to do...😡

[AllenJessup]

I've set permissions on a folder I've created just for temp and Autosave files so that the system can't delete those files. It means I have to clean it out frequently. But the software can't delete the Autosave files.

[rl_jackson]

I too have had issues with the Autosave feature not "Autosaving", It's routinely been an issue. I know that uStation doesn't have this issue something to do with how each program uses memory.

@AllenJessup what do you do to the folder just make it Read/Write only?

[AllenJessup]

@rl_jackson 

This is how it is set. I did this years ago when I still had Admin rights.

[brian.strandberg]

2 things I have done to combat the spinning blue circle.  Not guaranteed to be 100% effective, but it does help a ton.

1) check the task manager.  IGNORE it if it says 'Not responding', this means it isn't accepting user input, which we already know.  Check to see if the memory is fluctuating.  If it is, then it is doing something.

2) Hover over the Civil 3d icon on the taskbar.  For the drawing that is stuck, click the 'Red X Close Program Button'

This will force Civil 3d to bring up the Save Drawing prompt.  I can then hit Cancel to abort the close program sequence and save my drawings normally.  I usually continue working. 

[AllenJessup]

Good tips. I check the Page Fault Delta. I often see the program busily paging to the disk. Don't know why because it always looks like there is plenty of memory available.

[neilyj666]

Yes I always check the PF Delta and generally leave Civil 3D if the delta is changing but the problem is usually how long to leave it for??