Nearly constant beach balling on a new Macbook Pro

[michaelbuffington]

The latest update of Fusion 360 is very close to unusable on a brand new, totally stock Macbook Pro.

More often than not, the app is completely frozen, showing macOS's beach ball icon indicating that the process is totally non-responsive. I've not noticed a pattern yet, though it always happens when auto-saving and manual saving. The other times it happens always seem related to some user input of some kind. In other words, it doesn't just freeze when left alone (aside from auto-saves).

It freezes with old designs or new designs. Sometimes it'll freeze for a minute, then freeze again just seconds later. Some operations just work, and sometimes those same operations seem to cause the app to freeze.

I've tried setting the autosave interval to 30 minutes, but have seen random freezes occur every few minutes (which leads me to suspect it's not 100% related to saving).

System OS:

macOS 10.12.5

Hardware:

MacBook Pro Retina (MacBookPro13,3)

Intel Core i7

2.7 GHz

16 GB

AMD Radeon Pro 455 with 2048 VRAM

This machine is brand new, replacing an old Macbook Air that runs Fusion 360 without issue. The only thing installed so far aside from macOS defaults is Fusion 360.

[michaelbuffington]

I forgot to also mention that I'm on a gigabit connection, not behind a VPN. Just a normal home broadband connection.

[paul.clauss]

Hi @michaelbuffington

Thanks for posting! I apologize for the delay in response. 

I had a look at your crash reports and only saw one from this year, which leads me to believe that Fusion is hanging and experiencing poor performance rather than a hard crash. Does this follow your experience? If you are crashing please submit the reports - they can be very helpful in troubleshooting these issues.

Sometimes a newer update to Fusion 360 will not jive well with out-of-date graphics drivers - it seems like yours should be up-to-date as it is a new computer, but you never know. Please check to ensure you are using the most current drivers for the AMD Radeon Pro card.

I would also recommend optimizing Fusion 360 for performance using the instructions at this link - this procedure often helps resolve issues with hanging.

While it sounds like your network should be fine to run Fusion 360, you may want to try temporarily disabling your anti-virus and firewall softwares to see if they could be interfering. If Fusion performs better while they are disabled, you may need to add the exceptions described in this article to your anti-virus/firewall programs. 

If you are confident that this issue occurred after Fusion 360 was updated, it could be that there was an error during the update that has resulted in poor performance. You could try performing a clean uninstall and reinstalling Fusion 360 to see if it helps.

If you continue to see poor performance, please gather your diagnostic log files using this procedure and attach them to this forum thread - I am happy to have a look!

[michaelbuffington]

I haven't tried the optimization steps since this machine, in theory, should be capable of at least the same performance of a much older machine with same settings. Though I can and will since I realize that just because this machine is newer doesn't mean its drivers are bug free.

I've also noticed no difference when my network firewall is turned off vs. on. And there's no anti-virus on this machine.

I think one reason you don't see crash reports is because it doesn't crash. It hangs for minutes at a time, then resumes.

I also did what you said about gathering log files and noticed something. First of all, it took hours to complete the step. I went to Help > Diagnostic Log Files and the app froze for 2+ hours before it eventually popped up the message saying "logs collected". I clicked the button to show me the location in Finder and saw that the zip file was over 5GB. I suspect that's abnormal.

Out of curiosity I unzipped the file. That took 30 minutes. The single largest file in the collection was the most recent log file in Autodesk Fusion 360/93PVXXEXB6K6/logs - unzipped it's over 12GB. I looked at portions of the log file using traditional command line unix tools (tail, etc) and saw a lot of the following kinds of entries:

20170911T172338 E NEUTRON_BUG_ALERT(false)
Function: cancelAutoSave
File: ***/svc_p_bi/Perforce/Neutron/Streams/Projects/Neutron/ReleaseCandidate/src/Core/Neutron/Server/DataModel/AutoSave/AutoSaveController.cpp
Line: 994
Thread Info: [Name: Main], [Id: 3079865]

Bug Alerts are usually indicative of subtle problems with the program or with data. Please log a defect if you can reproduce this work flow. Please mention BugAlert in the defect's description.

[Show call stack] - Show call stack information. [Retry] - Launches CER Dialog. [Ignore] - Continues program.

Those messages were so frequent, in fact, that their millisecond values were often identical for hundreds of entries in a row. That's hard to do. Maybe having a fast computer isn't so good after all?

If I were to guess, I'd say that there are at least two issues. The failed autosave, but probably more problematic, the absolutely insane amount of logged exceptions for the failed autosave. 12GB of log entries in a single day (actually in a span of 6 hours) is what I'd call excessive.

[michaelbuffington]

It's worth mentioning that I'd initiated the log file steps this morning after I'd read other posts suggesting it. Surely the eagle eyed will see that my last reply was only an hour after you suggested me taking that step, yet it took several hours for me to see the contents of the logs I describe in my last reply.

[paul.clauss]

Hi @michaelbuffington

Thanks for posting! Waiting two hours for the log files to be packages is certainly not expected, and the size of the ZIP file on your system also seems excessive. Gathering my logs took about one minute and the size of the zip file was only 7.3MB...

The number of autosave messages that you found in the logs also seems unexpected, but without having a look through all the logs it is hard for me to say whats happening here. The recovery files could be failing because Fusion is focused on an active command - recovery files can be skipped when this is the case. Unfortunately this is a current limitation in Fusion 360.

Did you perform a clean uninstall and reinstall Fusion using the instructions in my previous post? As it certainly seems that Fusion is acting erratically, particularly with the size of the log file package you generated, I am thinking this could be an issue in which the software was corrupted during the update - please let me know if the clean uninstall/reinstall procedure works to improve performance.

[michaelbuffington]

The behavior I'm experiencing is happening on a fresh install of Fusion 360 on a clean macOS install.

I can certainly fully uninstall and reinstall, but I sincerely doubt it'll make a difference at this point given that the current install occurred just a few days ago.

I've started watching logs while the freezes happen. I'm nearly 100% certain they're related to autosaving, or rather, a failure to make a backup for crash recovery of an autosave.

I'll be trying to perform some operation (in the latest case I simply tried to measure something) and it'll beach ball. Watching the logs, the moment it "unfreezes", an error similar to this will show up in the logs:

20170912T202221 I Started autosaving document: [the foremost design name]
20170912T202225 I Canceling autosave of [the foremost design name]
20170912T202451 E Failed to backup file /Users/nnn/Library/Application Support/Autodesk/Autodesk Fusion 360/nnn/CrashRecovery/someid.backup to crash-recovery folder

It's worth noting that autosave is set to every 60 minutes, yet it tries autosaving as often as every 2 minutes.

Log entries also don't show up until after the app is done being frozen. So in the example above, 2 minutes after it froze, that's when the first entry from 2 minutes earlier actually shows up in the log.

I've checked permissions of the folder that Fusion 360 is trying to save to - it's readable and writable by the user Fusion 360 is running in, so I doubt it can't save because of permissions issues.

The same freezes happen when I save manually, though the closest thing I see to an error is - no mention of crash recovery files. It could be totally unrelated, but there's nothing else in the logs that indicate what might cause a freeze up:

20170912T205552 I Undefined error: 0

Here's something puzzling though - sometimes autosaves succeed. I'm not certain yet, but they appear to succeed whenever Fusion 360 is not in the foreground. When it is in the foreground, it seems to freeze and fail to save. That's mind boggling. I write macOS apps, and the only thing I can think of that could cause that might be sandboxing or app nap (only the latter seems to be used by Fusion 360). But even then, it's not like app nap should have any impact on the saving of a file.

Also puzzling: the lowest interval I can set for autosaving is 5 minutes. Yet, clearly, Fusion 360 is trying to autosave as often as every 2 minutes.

Is it possible that the autosave I'm seeing in logs is referring to the saving of crash recovery files?

Finally, as I was writing this, Fusion 360 crashed. I made sure to send the report.

[paul.clauss]

Hi @michaelbuffington

Thanks for the response! The hanging could certainly have something to do with the auto-saves - but I will need you to attach the webservices.log and a full application log file to further investigate this. Please attach these files to your next post - they should provide valuable information to help us investigate this crash. We may be able to reduce the size of your log files if you clear your local cache, recreate the problem, and then re-gather the logs - this should shorten them and allow us to focus in on this problem.

The reason I present the clean uninstall and reinstall as an option here is that, as these issues seem to have begun occurring shortly after the new installation. It is possible that some error during installation is the root cause of this behavior and a clean uninstall will fix this issue. Please try doing so and attach your log files to this forum thread if performance continues to suffer.

Also, can you confirm if this is happening with any file in Fusion 360, or does performance seem to suffer only with certain designs? If you only notice this behavior with certain designs, please share one of them with me - feel free to direct message me a public link if you cannot share the design on this forum thread.

I also wonder if something in your local cache is the root cause of this issue. Would you mind testing out the procedures below to clean up your local cache and let me know if any of them seem to help? 

Workaround 1: Overwrite Queued Files in Offline Mode

1. Manually select to work offline on the offending computer.

2. Open the design with the issue from the data panel while in offline mode.

3. Save a new version of the design while in offline mode.

4. Go back online and see if the design will sync.

For information about offline mode, see:
How to work in offline mode in Fusion 360

Workaround 2: Clear User Cache

1. Make a backup of anything that has not saved to the cloud.

   See: How to make a local archive (back-up) file in Fusion 360

2. Clear the local cache.

   See: How to clear local user cache in Fusion 360
3. Re-test.

Workaround 3: Manually clear out the upload Queue and upload meter

1. Close Fusion 360

2. Browse to:

Mac
Macintosh HD > Users > *** > Library > Application Support > Autodesk > Autodesk Fusion 360 > *** > W.Login 

Windows
C:\Users\***\AppData\Local\Autodesk\Autodesk Fusion 360\***\W.Login\

2. Copy the entire Q directory and the UploadQueuedFileList.xml to a different directory for safe keeping. 

3. Delete the Q directory and the UploadQueuedFileList.xml

4. Delete the jobs.json and the jobs.json.lck files located in:

Mac
Macintosh HD > Users > *** > Library > Application Support > Autodesk > Autodesk Fusion 360 > *** > P.Login 

Windows
C:\Users\***\AppData\Local\Autodesk\Autodesk Fusion 360\***\P.Login

5. Restart Fusion 360

Hopefully this helps! Please attach the log files to your next post if you continue to experience difficulties - we will need to have a first hand look at them to continue troubleshooting. I look forward to hearing from you.

[ahsan.autodesk]

Hi @michaelbuffington

Thanks for your detailed posts, and your willingness to do some troubleshooting yourselves :-).

I second the suggestions provided by Paul. It'll be good to rule out any install issues.

We'll also need to find out if these issues are limited to a particular file, or can be repeated with any file.

A few more pointers:

• If auto-save fails for some reason on a document, we retry it after a minute, provided the user is not actively working on that document. We don't wait for the next auto-save cycle
• When auto-save fails 3-5 times in a row on a document, we try to show a warning message to the user, encouraging the user to do an explicit save. Can you please confirm that you're seeing that warning message?
• You mentioned that trying to save this document also hangs for a while, before failing with a generic error message. We would appreciate if you can share this file with us so we can debug the issue further.
• The auto-save messages you're seeing in the log file are indeed related to crash recovery. But I'm very surprised at the size of the log file. We'll try and make the auto-save messages more concise. If it is possible for you to send us that one (big) log file somehow, it'll help us find out other ways of reducing its size.

Thanks much