Why Fusion 360 is so slow!!
It depends on the data and what you are trying to do with it. Can you share your design here, and list some operations that are particularly slow? I don't know what you mean by "even if I do any drawing". Do you mean sketching? Which sketch? There may be approaches to use that could help, but we need more information.
Jeff Strater
Engineering Director
What I mean by "Drawing" is this:
I have a Parasolid file of a PCB and every time I try to do any modifications on the board, the software just freeze for several minutes. Is there anything I can do to improve the performance?
Thanks. So, is the main problem creating a new drawing from this design, or is it making a change to the board and then updating the drawing? It would help to understand what kind of change you are making - are you moving bodies, or what? Is the delay in making the edit in the Design workspace, or updating the drawing in the Drawing workspace?
As to what can be done, do you need all those bodies to remain as separate bodies? Are all of them necessary for your workflow (some people will remove small components that are not necessary for, say, placing the PCB in an enclosure). Are they actually bodies, or components? What do you plan to do with this board? Is it a component in another assembly? Or is this PCB itself the main goal of your design?
If you cannot share the design, we understand, but if you can, it would possibly help.
Jeff Strater
Engineering Director
"Is the delay in making the edit in the Design workspace, or updating the drawing in the Drawing workspace?"
In both cases. Basically, the Parasolid file imported into fusion360 was generated in Altium Designer, so it has several vias, tracks, and components. Often, I need to extrude some bodies or create new ones in this file, sometimes I need to move some of them. When I try to extrude something the software freeze. In Drawing, the software takes a lot of time to create projected views. I believe this happens because Fusion gets all information from this PCB. The image below gives an idea of the structure that I have here.
do you need all those bodies to remain as separate bodies? Yes, I could remove just a few, but I don't think it will make a difference.
Are all of them necessary for your workflow (some people will remove small components that are not necessary for, say, placing the PCB in an enclosure). Yes
Are they actually bodies, or components? It has both elements.
What do you plan to do with this board? We use it to check the PCB and how it fits in the enclosure. Fusion has an integration tool to use with Altium Designer. Later, we use the same Parasolid file to create a realistic render on Keyshot.
Is it a component in another assembly? No.
Or is this PCB itself the main goal of your design? Yes
There is a high probability that you don't underestimate just how many components and solid bodies are in your design.
So:
Enable viewing of commands like so:
Then type "component.counts" into the command field and press Enter.
Share a screenshot of what you see like this:
The amount of bodies is very high but the majority are simple structures, small sizes, and nothing complex. Is fusion treating all bodies the same way(simple or complex bodies)? are the quantities more critical than the complexity of the bodies?
What I mean is this: If I have just one very complex component and thousands of simple components(like several simple rectangular bars), this second is heavier to fusion to process any changes(moving only one simple bar, for example)?
In another PCB I had 3516 simple bodies and the same problem has happened.
@alex.batistaV3XKC wrote:
The amount of bodies is very high but the majority are simple structures, small sizes, and nothing complex. Is fusion treating all bodies the same way(simple or complex bodies)? are the quantities more critical than the complexity of the bodies?
What I mean is this: If I have just one very complex component and thousands of simple components(like several simple rectangular bars), this second is heavier to fusion to process any changes(moving only one simple bar, for example)?
In another PCB I had 3516 simple bodies and the same problem has happened.
It completely depends on what you are doing, but yes, nearly 16000 bodies is always going to be slower on most operations than one massive component. In fact, that can be one technique here - combining the geometry into one body inside one component (or at least reduce the number of components/bodies). If your primary workflow here is to detect interferences, see how it fits in the enclosure, I suspect that you do not need all of those 16000 bodies. It looks like you have bodies that represent copper traces inside of the board. Those are likely not necessary for that use. Similarly, there may be lots of small resistors and capacitors on the board that are not necessary. Is the silkscreen layer represented by one or more bodies?
If you are willing to share this model with us, we can take a look at it.
Jeff Strater
Engineering Director
It would seem that you are not quite aware what the difference between bodies and components is.
I doubt that for a mechanical assembly design you need all of those components.
The vast amount of PCB designs with that many components is small passives, decoupling capacitors and resistors.
Those can be deleted. Copper tracks also are usually not needed in the form of actual geometry.
I have a recurring experience with STEP files generated in Altium that might help. Whenever I import STEP files that are exported in Altium, Fusion becomes very slow especially when moving these PCBs or applying joint to them. After it happened again I figured out that the culprit is redundant bodies in [usually] user-generated connector models. For example in this screencast I show a connector (CN7) that originally has 50 leads. In the exported STEP file this connector is a component with 51 sub-components, of which 50 of them are named Leads. Now each "Leads" itself contains 50 bodies! So the exported STEP contains 2500 bodies for this connector alone! These redundant bodies are overlapping and in the first glance I couldn't notice this many redundant bodies are included in the file. Nowadays whenever I receive these files I first clean them up and afterwards there is no issue. And when cleaning up I delete mercilessly, because anyway usually one doesn't need that much detailed information about the PBC, as @TrippyLighting also said it. Sometimes I totally delete everything and apply a decal, just to keep track of PCB orientation and it's components, like this:
When reporting performance problem you need to be more specific.
Moving and joining assemblies with many components is slow. However, if you don't move your PCB but design your "whatever" around it you might never experience that slow behavior.
Another area that can get slow is selection. Fusion 360 uses pre-selection highlighting and that cannot be turned off. For that to work, Fusion 360 continually looks for selectable geometry in a cone shaped volume protruding from the mouse cursor. The more geometry is available in the view port, the more slower it can be.
I would create a selection set of those things you don't need to see and then hide the selected items and/or set them to unselectable. You can select bodies, or components by size ( look at the selection filters) :
With a bit of pre-planning this can work.
