Drawings tip-of-the-week #7: Modify Recovery Time Interval to Improve Stability when Working with Large Drawings

[olivia.struckman]

The Fusion 360 Drawings team has been busy recently (thus the lull in Quick Tips 😉) -  We were excited to roll out new features in May, June, August, and September, with more to come. We have also been working to stabilize the drawings workspace. We know from your crash reports (thank you for sending them in) that some of you are encountering ‘freezes’ or ‘hangs’ when working on large/complex drawings. After doing some digging, we wanted to share some ideas that might help reduce the number of “hangs” you see when working on large drawings. 

Say you are dimensioning away, and haven’t saved your file for a while. You click on a new command, and bang – Fusion 360 freezes. What might really be happening in the background is that the auto-save timer kicked in, and Fusion 360 is saving your drawing – in between commands! Since we currently don’t display a message letting you know that a save is in progress, it might seem like Fusion 360 has crashed, so you ‘kill’ it. While we work on reducing the save times for larger Drawings, we wanted to give you all a quick tip to reduce the potential for ‘hang ups’ while Fusion 360 auto saves in between commands:

1. First, you can change your Recovery Time Interval setting, in Preferences, to a larger value in order to reduce the frequency of auto-saves (the default is 5 minutes, you may want to try something like 15 or 30 minutes). 

   

2. Secondly, you may want to use user-initiated saves to reset the auto-save timer via Ctrl-S / Cmd-S (Note - you will be versioning the Drawing each time). You get to control when to save, so you won't be interrupted by inconveniently-timed auto-saves while editing your drawing.

   These are very much workarounds and NOT the ideal - we recognize that, and are hard at work in the background to reduce save times along with other stabilization efforts as we continue to deliver new Drawings features. We’ll post updates to this thread as we make more progress in this area - let us know if this helps you in the meantime!

   Olivia Struckman

   Product Manager - Fusion 360