Fusion360 is still really slow

[jamie.q.white]

I just started designing again after a month fabricating things I designed.

Fusion360 is way, way, way too slow.  How about focusing on speed and performance for a few releases before adding more features?  I literally spend 20-25% of my time watching the beachball spin.  Over the day, it adds up to hours of wasted time, a few seconds and minutes at a time.  Probably 2 hours out of an 8 hour day.  Really cuts into productivity when I have to get up for a coffee everytime I open a file.

FWIW, A360 and the forums websites are really, really slow.   It's ridiculous. How about improving speed?

I've been complaining about speed and performance for years now, and it never seems to improve.

Also FWIW, it is not my system: iMac Retina 5k 4 GHz Intel Core i7 w/ 32Gb RAM & AMD Radeon R9 M295X 4096 MB / 40Mbps DSL.  

thanks for listening.

-jamie

[jamie.q.white]

Hi Phil,

Thank you for the continued help. I am at the end of a very long rope.

I am only using the build-in iMac monitor. 

I cannot toggle these settings:

I click on the box and nothing changes.

The graphics driver says it requires a restart.  Haven't had time to shut everything down and re-start.  I will try at the end of the day today.

-jamie

[Phil.E]

Jamie,

Thanks for trying. It's odd to be blocked from those settings.

Can you try using the Graphics Diagnostic dialog check box that limits effects? It's the big hammer approach, because it should shut ALL effects. If that doesn't work something is wrong.

There is one other place in preferences that can hurt performance if you somehow enabled it at some point. Be sure Transparency Effect is set to use Better Performance.

[jamie.q.white]

"My computer is an almost 6-year old stone age moster compared to the screaming high-end rocket you are piloting."

Want to trade 😉 ?  I bought my current computer for the specific purpose of running Fusion. I was having performance issues years ago and I got the impression that it was my old computer.  So I bought this one.  With the fancy-schmancy expensive graphics card. Poor performance persists.

-jamie

[jamie.q.white]

Hi Phil,

These are the graphics setting I have been using all along:

I tried the "limit" option.  I'll leave it enabled and try and work with it.  The display looks rough but I don't notice any speed difference.

-jamie

[innovatenate]

The setting in the graphics diagnostic file, "Limit all effects to provide optimum performance" may be preventing you from unchecking the anti-aliasing and Ambient Occlusion. In fact this setting should override the settings in the Effects fly out menu.

For good measure, can you try temporarily unchecking the "limit all effects option..." and then trying to uncheck the options in the Effects menu? After you uncheck the options in the Effects menu, re-enable Limit all effects in the Graphics diagnostics menu.

I strongly suspect the option to "Open in Low Resolution" that @Phil.E made previously will provide the most impact to the performance.

One other questions, is do you have any anti-virus software installed on this system like AVG or Sophos? (Yes I know its a Mac) If so, could you test with the anti-virus software disabled? I have seen active "scanning" cause the type of periodic hangs that you are describing in both Windows and Mac systems.

One other thought is to test working in offline mode. Does the performance seem any smoother while working offline? Hope this helps.

Thanks,

[jamie.q.white]

Hi Nate,

Thanks for the help. I had a few moments to try your suggestions.

"For good measure, can you try temporarily unchecking the "limit all effects option..." and then trying to uncheck the options in the Effects menu? After you uncheck the options in the Effects menu, re-enable Limit all effects in the Graphics diagnostics menu. "

This is not it. I see the following when I uncheck  the "limit all effects option..."

"I strongly suspect the option to "Open in Low Resolution" that @Phil.E made previously will provide the most impact to the performance. "

Intial impression is that performance is improved.  Not sure about stability.  Startup was slow but manipulating my design is a little better.

"One other thought is to test working in offline mode. Does the performance seem any smoother while working offline? Hope this helps."

Performance is better but it is really inconvenient. I have 40Mbps DSL. Faster does not exist here.  Fusion360 needs to work with the infrastructure available in the US.

"One other questions, is do you have any anti-virus software installed on this system like AVG or Sophos? (Yes I know its a Mac) If so, could you test with the anti-virus software disabled? I have seen active "scanning" cause the type of periodic hangs that you are describing in both Windows and Mac systems."

No anti-virus. I use Magic Prefs, and screencast is running in the background.

Fusion just updated itself.  Why did this happen? I thought I had the latest version.

 

[TrippyLighting]

I'd try to use a normal mouse with a real, clickable scroll wheel, turn off magic prefs for a while and see if that makes a difference.

 Granted it's many years ago that I tried to use the magic mouse with 3D software (Blender) and used magic prevs to emulate a third button and scroll wheel, but it did not take long for me to replace the magic mouse with a "normal" mouse.

[innovatenate]

I'm glad that the "Open in Low Resolution" option has helped. Have you been able to quantify the impact at all? Is it 10% or 50% better?

The low resolution setting should not significantly impact the start-up time, but the regular use of the application should be much faster with less pixels to push around. In that last error message you posted, I couldn't help but notice that the system is reporting running out of graphics memory. This is amazing considering there is 4GB of video memory! Do you recall what you were working on when that error occurred?

Good point @TrippyLighting! Maybe the input device is causing the issue. I have seen some support cases in the past where users were inadvertantly making selection to things while using a Magic Mouse. This was reported as a command not functioning normally. I could see a similar potential here. Perhaps there are some accidental selections that cause unecessary compute to occur due to the interaction with magic mouse. If you have a cheap old scroll wheel mouse, a good diagnostic procedure to rule out the magic mouse/magic prefs as a possible cause would be to use the "normal" mouse for a bit and see if there is any difference.

Do you have any other peripheral devices plugged in like a space mouse or a wacom tablet? (Sorry if you already answered this..) I have noted in previous cases that a 3D spacemouse can increase the loading on graphics. 

I hope this helps a bit more. 

Thanks,

[O.Tan]

From the looks of it, it seems something is wrong with your OSX, as it's not the hardware issue. I guess if you tried opening the LEGO model, Fusion will basically Not Responding?

I wonder would AD be open (and if Mr. White is open for it) to remote screen sharing so AD engineer that specialised in OS X can check out what's going on? and probably document it for future reference and probably find out possible bugs or software that doesn't run well alongside Fusion cause of certain issues?

So from my PoV:
1. Do a system defragment (OSX should do this automatically but there's chances where something got messed up and it doesn't do a proper job)
2. Reformat and reinstall OSX.

[mfeathers]

could it be this "Screencast" you have running in the background. I don't use that sort of thing much but I know gamers take a serious FPS hit when using such apps.

[Phil.E]

@mfeathers

Screencast is a companion product that launches when you start Fusion. If you aren't currently using it (i.e. "recording") there should not be any effect, but it wouldn't hurt to try shutting it off.

@jamie.q.white

What version of Screencast are you running? If it's vers. 1.4 you need to replace it. There are problems with that very old version of Screencast.

Also, I think you misunderstand what @innovatenate was asking you regarding offline. Again, we are looking for clues here. If for some reason there was a difference between offline and online, it would point to a whole set of things to look at, as those two modes are quite different.

You say "Performance is better but it is really inconvenient. I have 40Mbps DSL. Faster does not exist here.  Fusion360 needs to work with the infrastructure available in the US." So performance is better in offline mode? Is it 100% better, or just a little? A few more details about this would be helpful.

Thanks,

[jamie.q.white · Accepted solution]

Phil, thanks for bearing with me.

This morning performance is amazing, and I have been working for a couple of hours with no crashes.  I changed the following things since last night:

1) Clean install of El Cap

2) Updated Screencast.

3) Fusion360 updated to its latest version.

4) Rebooted DSL modem (I do this often but it never hurts).

I can manipulate the Fusion360 Performance test designs in high resolution mode with just a bit of lag.  They take less than a minute to open. 3D connection behavior is much better.

This is the first time since I started using Fusion360 that I've had this level of performance. Wow.

Offline mode "feels" slightly faster, but I am not yet sure exactly why.

Pan/orbit/zoom still "detach" from the mouse (cursor changes and moves around the screen but pan/orbit/zoom does not pan/orbit/zoom until I click on the cube).

The first two times I started Fusion360 it pegged the processors with only an "untitled" design open, but it seems to have calmed down.

One thing I wonder about is that there were several updates that I "missed" because I was not using Fusion 360.  Could this have caused my problems? I am not entirely convinced that the issue was the graphics card.

-jamie

[mfeathers]

I forgot to comment about this earlier... There was a March 30th update. I think it had been a little while prior to that.

[Phil.E]

• You may have missed minor updates, but not a major update.
• If you had missed a major update, you would have for sure been forced to update when you started. I'm not sure at the moment if a major update interrupts a working session.
• If you only missed minor updates, then yes if you never restarted Fusion you would not have gotten any notice of an update, and minor updates allow you to continue working until you feel like restarting.

Do you leave Fusion running for months/weeks at a time? Like all things "computer", it's probably advisable to restart Fusion after several hours or days of work. You may have been working under the burden of a (heretofore unknown) memory leak, for instance. The memory leak could have affected your graphics card, and would produce something like this, especially likely given that you had "low graphics memory" messages.

And don't forget this could be a confluence of factors that produced an exceptionally bad experience.

Going forward, if you notice the same thing, you could potentially now more accurately narrow down what you think happened and let us know. We need to fix whatever happened to you, if it's truly Fusion's fault or is just some bad combination of things. It will help you and other users. Meanwhile, we find and fix things like memory leaks as a high priority item. (not saying that's what it was, just pointing out that this case is relatively just as important) So hopefully we found and fixed whatever was bothering your experience with Fusion.

Thanks for your patience, sorry it took so long. I'm glad a conversation like this can take place to help you and all the other users. Thank you for participating and getting through it. Please let us know if you have any other questions or concerns.

Thanks!

[Anonymous]

I'd like to add my simple comments that the performance of Fusion is terrible, and I've essentially given up on using it as one of our tools.   We run powerful Macs and a few Windows machines and have no trouble running any other CAD or rendering software - ACAD products are notoriously slow and temperamental.  I've tried using Fusion to translate a small file with three simple parts from DWG to IGES or STEP and I had to leave Fusion running overnight to get the import complete, and now I've been waiting close to a half hour for it to export an IGES..... I gave up on exporting a STEP file because after about 4 minutes it gave me a 3 kb file which is useless.  

I hate to be so negative, but it seems that Autodesk designs products that need to be fine tuned to run efficiently, and most engineers, particularly independent engineers or small offices don't have time to fine tune settings and access xml files to make a product work.  It's very much the Microsoft philosophy that a user must be deeply committed and involved in the function of the product in order to gain the maximum benefit from using the product, but cloud computing approaches product function from the opposite perspective - the user should not need to be involved in the function, and should only care about the productive benefits of the product.   Compare OnShape to Fusion - features will typically develop and get better on both products, but OnShape is a dream to use compared to Fusion.  

Update - it's now been another 20 + minutes since I began this post, taking a few phone calls and stepping out for a few quick meetings in other offices, and I still don't have an IGES file exported from Fusion.  

I've definitely would appreciate any constructive, detailed feedback from the Autodesk support community that would allow us to resolve any performance problems and continue to use Fusion as one of our tools.  

[Phil.E]

Can you share one of these problem files so we can analyze it?

[innovatenate]

Another thought to add on here.. Are you using the local or the cloud translators?

There are two sets of translators for importing/opening and for exporting/saving. There is are some local translators you can use locally without involving any network communications and there are the cloud translators which require an internet connection to use.  If you lose internet connection, you can continue to work. 

If you're using the cloud translators and experiencing any issues, it may be helpful to review the Autodesk Health Dashboard for issues with the service. Since the cloud translators do require an internet connection, what type of upload/download speeds are you working with? How large are the files you're translating? Do you know if your network may have some components like firewalls, proxy servers, or anti-virus software that regulates the network communications? If so, it may help to share the Network Configuration guide with the IT staff. 

It may also be a file specific issue. So @Phil.E is right about sharing a sample file.

I hope that helps. Let us know if you have any questions.

Thanks,

[MarcelLenormand]

I'm also experiencing many spinning beachball hangs.

It's not happening on all of my projects — typically it's happening on the most important one.

Even simple operations in sketches, modifying objects and creating objects cause a +10sec hang.  Updating dependencies just took almost 1'30".

Any suggestions?

(although the beachball is not shown in the video, it occurs from approximately 10secs until 37secs) 

[TrippyLighting]

Create your own thread.

Share your design.

[jrohit1110]

Please optimizer the performance of fusion 360. Its very slow. Its been updated and all but it is programmed very badly. The lag is my only problem that makes me convert from fusion to other softwares. Please take care of this problem

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