Announcements
Attention for Customers without Multi-Factor Authentication or Single Sign-On - OTP Verification rolls out April 2025. Read all about it here.

Performance and usability issues with Fusion 360 (June Update) captured on video

MartinMajewski
Advocate

Performance and usability issues with Fusion 360 (June Update) captured on video

MartinMajewski
Advocate
Advocate

Hi all,

 

as I already mentioned in the "slow performance & crashes" thread I experience major performance problems with Fusion 360 on my Mac.

 

So I made a video and want to show you how my user experience with Fusion 360 currently is.

The following video is marked private on YouTube, so you can only access it via the following link.

 

https://youtu.be/xPaC2nwXKBw

 

If there are any problems viewing it, please let me know.

 

The video does not only show my performance issues, but also a few other usability flaws.

 

Because I don't have much time to edit the video and to recorded spoken comments (my apologies) I write my comments here, so you hopefully understand what I am showing you in this video.

 

This video was captured on a freshly rebooted system. Therefore the 3D navigation is pretty smooth. After some uptime this changes dramatically. But what you can see in the video is the lagging of alle menus and operations.

I recorded this video with Quicktime (and mouseposé) and therefor you don’t see the constantly reoccurring spinning beachball cursor because of a long running operation i.e. application hang.

 

Rule of thumb: If you see the mouse cursor stopping or not moving for more than a second -> beachball-time!

 

My system the video was recorded with is a MacBook Pro 13’’ - Early 2015 - 2,9Ghz - 16GB RAM - 256GB SSD Version with Yosemite 10.10.4 (same behavior on 10.10.3).

 

I will provide links with time-markers to the section of the video to which my comments are related to.

 

So lets start:

 

  1. Fusion 360 (non-App-Store version) is still not showing up in spotlight. So you have to have a shortcut somewhere present, or you will end up digging through Finder in order to find the application under such a convenient location like „/Users/martinmajewski/Library/Application Support/Autodesk/webdeploy/production/aed8aabe08959634c15091c7e2e9e3e952f5bb77“.

    The only thing Spotlight is able to find is the „remove“ tool… Can’t tell how often I opened that tool by accident and nearly clicked the uninstall button.

    https://youtu.be/xPaC2nwXKBw

  2. Extremely slow startup. Because Fusion 360 crashes a lot I have to spend a long timespan waiting for Fusion every day…

    https://youtu.be/xPaC2nwXKBw?t=21s

  3. Slow and non-responsive menus… e.g.

    https://youtu.be/xPaC2nwXKBw?t=1m12s
    https://youtu.be/xPaC2nwXKBw?t=2m42s

    There are a lot more places there the GUI is simply not responding to my clicks.

  4. Weird viewport jumping. When I use my touchpad and try to zoom or pan with a two finger gesture it happens often that the viewport behaves odd, like seen here:

    https://youtu.be/xPaC2nwXKBw?t=7m12s

  5. I already posted an idea-request for a better parameters management window. But what should really be added in the next release is the possibility to change the variable-type (i.e. the units). Currently you have to delete a parameter if you have chosen the wrong type.

    https://youtu.be/xPaC2nwXKBw?t=2m2s

    See also:
    http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/fusion-360-ideastation-request-a/parameters-dialog-not-blocking/idi-p/...

  6. Choosing a sketch segment or a object outline as path for a tool like the rectangular pattern tool is not always the best choice - especially when the sketch or objects gets modified. Construction lines would be a far better option but are not selectable as paths.

    https://youtu.be/xPaC2nwXKBw?t=11m35s

    See also: http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/fusion-360-ideastation-request-a/construction-lines-as-paths/idi-p/569...


These are „all“ problems for now. You can watch the video entirely if you like. Maybe you will finde some other odd behaviors that I forgot to mention here.

But the worst thing is the lagging and the instability of Fusion 360.
22 minutes video without a crash is a pretty good result.

 

I hope that I could provide some insights and help you guys to improve Fusion.

 

 

Bye

Martin

0 Likes
Reply
Accepted solutions (1)
2,034 Views
14 Replies
Replies (14)

Pedro_Bidarra
Collaborator
Collaborator
I believe the performance degradation over time is related to the video RAM getting full, it's a problem brought by Yosemite that Apple strangely hasn't resolved, you also don't find many people talking about it, here's one example, the link below, I'm the Pedro in the comments.

http://www.syntacticsugar.nl/2014/10/osx-10-10-yosemite-animation-performance/
1 Like

Phil.E
Community Manager
Community Manager

Thanks Pedro for the great information!

 

Martin,

 

Thanks for posting your comments and concerns.

 

I read your other thread and it seems that the performance issues you are having are the result of the pattern you are creating. You mention Maya and Rhino can create these patterns, but also be aware that the data is very different between surface modeling programs like those and Fusion360. Fusion 360 uses boundary representation solids, or BREP solid whereas Maya and Rhino are surface modelers, thus their models are not typically intended for downstream uses such as simulation, CNC, drafting, etc.

 

Do you mind if I ask why you use patterned features in Fusion 360? Are these shapes representative of a manufactured product? Or are you using these patterns for purely visual results, i.e. a picture? Our past experiences have indicated that even very expensive CAD products, running on very highly capable computers can be brought to their knees with relatively easy patterns. In CAD programs, such as Fusion 360 or Inventor, you’ll notice that textures like expanded metal and screen are typically used, rather than punching a thousand holes in something, or that screw threads are depicted using bitmaps, rather than real modeled threads. In the case of modeled threads, they look great in renderings, but add very little to a model in terms of manufacturing it.

 

My advice is to model things that need to be modeled for the results that a model provides.

 

That being said, you should not see any crashes or beach balls that last minutes. We are definitely investigating your reports. However, we actually need a lot more information about your setup. There are lots of variables, and any help you can give us will get a reproducible case much more quickly, and thus we can fix any problems we have more quickly.

 

  • Can you go to the ? Help menu and use the Graphics Diagnostic tool, copy to clipboard, and paste the results for us?
  • Also, have you tried turning off all graphics effects? The Diagnostic has a check box for this. If this helps it would tell us a lot about what is going on.
  • What kind of internet connection do you have, in terms of speed? Does moving to a fast network help for cloud operations such as file open?

 

Can you try the same kind of work starting with a blank screen? In the video you have already loaded a heavy model. Let’s figure out if your performance issues are due to the heavy model, or your hardware, or Fusion 360 by creating a second video showing the same kinds of steps starting with a blank screen. Any beach ball would be a huge problem on a blank screen, other than for heavy operations like opening a model.

 

Now addressing your points one by one:

  1. Fusion does not appear in Spotlight because of the way we do live updates. It gets installed to your dock for this reason. I don’t think we plan on changing this. There may be a workaround, someone mentioned in another post. I will have to look for it another time.
  2. Your startup seem to be around 40 seconds. I did the same thing on a 13 inch MacBook Pro and got a 50 second result. Startup after that was only 30 seconds. Can you try on a warm system?  Perhaps other users can post their startup times as responses here so we know for sure if 40 seconds is unreasonable. In my opinion, having started Fusion 360 many thousands of times on dozens of systems, this is within the acceptable start-up window.  
  3. It’s really hard to tell where any lags or non-responsive menus are. I watched for a while on both of those links and didn’t see anything bad. Your model opens quickly, all of the button pushes produce a result. At 2:17 you click on the units in the parameters dialog a few times, but from your other post you know that you cannot change units there. So if you could more closely point out time stamps in your video where any lags happen, it would help us to see them. 
  4. This is a known issue. Try using Ortho camera  instead of perspective for your modeling. We’re working on this, any more detail you can share is good.
  5. This is a product request that we have captured and are currently upgrading the parameters dialog experience, thanks for the input!




Phil Eichmiller
Software Engineer
Quality Assurance
Autodesk, Inc.


0 Likes

MartinMajewski
Advocate
Advocate

Thank you Pedro for this info. I also noticed huge long-term running issues with the WindowServer process of Yosemite - seems that Fusion accelerates that degeneration.

In fact, it seems that killing that process (which restarts itself immediately) helps with some of the visualization lags.

 

 

Hi Phil,

 

thank you for your fast response.

 

I will provide more information and a new video as soon as I finde the time for this.

 

At the moment let me explain what my intention is to use the pattern tool (which I changes from path pattern I used in my other post to rectangular pattern - the process of learning ^^).

 

I do a lot of modeling for 3D FDM printing. Fusion 360 is great because of the exact parametric modeling capabilities. FDM printers are not that accurate and you have to pay close attention to the measures of your object to eliminate an issue-factor that will probably cause problems during print (like the width of a wall that is no multiplier of the nozzle size, etc.). This is especially important when you are modeling functional objects (conductive- or mechanical-wise).
With modeling tools like Blender, Maya, etc. it is also possible to achieve "exact" models, but it is far more tedious.
So using Fusion 360 is a great choice but it also makes it crucial that you can model the entire object. Every slicing software I used so far makes it hard to do a "pattern-duplication" that is threaded as a single, accurate object.

 

Short info about me: I am M.Sc. student at the TU-Darmstadt here in Germany and do research in the field capacitive sensing at the Fraunhofer IGD with a focus on 3D printed interactive objects.

I really appreciate your advices and tipps, as I am still in the learning phase of how to use Fusion 360 - looking forward for Autodesk University 2015 here in Darmstadt in October. 😄

 

 

Hope that this info gives you helpful insights.

 

Best wishes,

Martin

0 Likes

Pedro_Bidarra
Collaborator
Collaborator
Thanks Phil, Martin,

In relation to the performance degradation I've a theory that this might be related to the memory compression feature in OS X Yosemite. There are some boot args that can be set in the EFI to disable swapping and compression, I'm going to give them a try.
0 Likes

Phil.E
Community Manager
Community Manager

Thanks Martin and Pedro.

 

Here is the link for the post about Spotlight workarounds:

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/post-your-tips-and-tutorials/use-launchbar-instead-of-failing-with-spo...

 





Phil Eichmiller
Software Engineer
Quality Assurance
Autodesk, Inc.


0 Likes

MartinMajewski
Advocate
Advocate

Thank you for pointing to this workaround, it might be useful for some users.

 

For me this is no option because I like the original Spotlight a lot and with El Capitain it gets even better.

I don't know the details of your update machanism or what makes it so unique and special that you don't want to go the "Apple route". Other non-AppStore applications are also able to provide on the fly updates without breaking the spotlight compatiblity. Take Adobe for example.

 

Be that as it may, I'll stick to the Dock-symbole for now! 🙂

0 Likes

Anonymous
Not applicable

I've been having issues similar to those mentioned in this thread, please let me know if this post is relevant enough or if I should be posting this elsewhere,

My issue is with trying to add an extrusion to replicate a welded fillet, but it's on a threaded rod to a flat section.

 

Fusion 360 crashes everytime I construct an arc on the plane as attached below. Does anyone have ideas to what I need to do?

 

 

0 Likes

Phil.E
Community Manager
Community Manager

Thanks for reporting it. I'm investigating this. It apparently freezes and doesn't offer a CER report.

 

Typically, this would be a new complaint and should get it's own post. The problem you are having here is not related to the OP. But thanks for looking for the solution before just posting! 🙂

 

The problem you are having here is that the sketch arc is connecting to the modeled threads. Do you really need the threads to be modeled for this design? The reason I ask is that these are considered "heavy" objects when it comes to the display and tracking of the faces. Often users can get into trouble by using hundreds of modeled threads in a design because it hurts performance. Often we find out they only liked the way it looked and had no real use for the 3D threads other than visual. If you do not model the threads (find the option in the Thread dialog) there should be no crash.

 

Thanks!





Phil Eichmiller
Software Engineer
Quality Assurance
Autodesk, Inc.


0 Likes

Phil.E
Community Manager
Community Manager

[reported internally as FUS-20022]





Phil Eichmiller
Software Engineer
Quality Assurance
Autodesk, Inc.


0 Likes

Anonymous
Not applicable
Accepted solution

Okay sweet as, I got around the problem by hiding the body of the thread as the thread was the core of this particular design.

I will note for future to start a new topic where applicable!

 

Thanks for your reply!

1 Like

cekuhnen
Mentor
Mentor

@MartinMajewski From what I can see in YouTube you dont really have lag issues when entering exiting featrue commands - it is just that Fusion takes some time to do math building the model. In that regards the app is actually pretty speedy.

Claas Kuhnen

Faculty Industrial Design – Wayne State Universit

Chair Interior Design – Wayne State University

Owner studioKuhnen – product : interface : design

0 Likes

Phil.E
Community Manager
Community Manager

@Anonymous

 

I just tested the fix for the crash you found. It will be included in a future update at as yet unspecified date.

 

The fix however does not allow the kind of workflow you are trying here.

 

The reason is that when you create the arc in your sketch you refer to the coil edge on the thread. This causes Fusion to project it into your new sketch.

  • Currently Fusion crashes when trying to project the coil to the new sketch.
  • After the fix, Fusion will not crash and give you a warning about the geometry instead.
  • Your method is actually the correct way to do this kind of thing.

 

This image attempts to explain the problem graphically, it is just an illustration and does not have all the details of your model.

 

demonstration_of_problem.png

 

Thanks,

 





Phil Eichmiller
Software Engineer
Quality Assurance
Autodesk, Inc.


1 Like

Anonymous
Not applicable

Thank you very much for investigating this for me. It's reassuring knowing I didn't try and do something crazy haha

0 Likes

Phil.E
Community Manager
Community Manager

For reference, this is the accepted solution to the threaded rod crash described by Nilesh.

 

"I got around the problem by hiding the body of the thread as the thread was the core of this particular design." This is done by not using "modeled threads" for the rod, at least while sketching with it.

 

Thanks,





Phil Eichmiller
Software Engineer
Quality Assurance
Autodesk, Inc.


1 Like