Terrible performance F360 (2D & 3D)

[infoYYZLD]

Hello friends,

we use fusion in our small company utilizing both:

3d design / 2d documentation

And electronics for hierarchical schematics, pcb’s and 3d pushes of ready modules. Those modules are then implemented in 3d assemblies of our products.

We’ve been using solidworks before on same machines without even a small problems or glitches. But this software is no longer an option for us because of pricing. We started with fusion 2 years ago but within that time it is getting worse and worse. 
assemblies are loaded for ages, frequently lagging when moving parts, electronics is quite ok being the child of eagle but creating 2d documentation out from not even huge assemblies is hilariously bad. Program glithes all the time on 2 separate machines. 

we did the troubleshooting using some help on autodesk helpcenter or even following threads from the forum but nothing works for us. It is terrible to work with the fusion and it slows down our work hardly. Maybe our pc’s are not superbly strong but they’re still not slow machines.

i9 13th gen (24cores, virtualization turned on)

Nvidia quadro P2200

64GB 3600MHz ram (all the same)

We’d like to ask for help how can we solve our problems. Those pc specs were totally fine with SW but they’re not happy with fusion at all.

For example:

looking at the photo- this is a „performance” of Fusion when editing 2d assembly drawing containing only about 50-60parts. Fusion consumes 52GB of RAM out of 64 available and still being superbly slow in processing. Cpu load is always low, graphics load is always low as well. You can imagine what is happening here when we open up those assemblies having 300 or 400parts…

pushing 2d pcb’s into 3d model with highest quality is also taking too long in our opinion.

 (1-3 minutes per 300x300mm 4layer pcb with ~100-150 components).

we tried turning off all other PC processing besides Fusion, no defenders, antivirus, no other services, only fusion. Fusion runtime processes switched to the Real-Time priority, internet connection is stable 1Gig. Graphics- we tried all possible settings and available online solutions posted on forum. We do not have more ideas what is going wrong here.

For more, it happens all the tome (10-20times per 8-10hour work) that fusion freezes when trying to open 3D assemblies or 2D documents. We must kill the process in manager and restart program because when even trying to wait for 3-5minutes nothing’s happening. Is this program too weak to be able to work with such a small models? Ive been working with assemblies that had over 3000parts in the past using SolidWorks and then it was more or less the same bad performance as fusion has with only 300parts. Are we demanding too much? 

we're open for any suggestions on how to troubleshoot that.

 

[lance.carocci]

CPU utilization is not necessarily an accurate indicator of CAD application activity. Many operations (such as parametric calculation) cannot be parallelized and must occur in sequence, so it's more often a question of how fast the processor can rip through a single thread.

Since you mentioned the 13th gen i9, I would confirm that there aren't any BIOS updates pending as that chip had some instability early on, and users who reported issues with Fusion in the past have seen improvement after an update.

It may also be the structure of the document that is influencing performance - depending on how things are referenced, or if you've done things like enabled modeling hole threads. It might be worth contacting a customer service agent to walk through your document structure and suggest any optimizations.

Lastly, Fusion really only uses hardware graphics acceleration to render the canvas and UI, and some forms of CAM toolpath simulation, because most calculations are FP64 for which CPUs tend to be better-optimized.

[jacob.weinstock]

Hi @infoYYZLD 

I'm sorry to hear you're running into these performance issues.

I'm the Customer Engagement Representative for the Fusion Performance team. I work directly with customers to understand performance problems and ensure that feedback, workflows, and technical findings are shared directly with our engineering teams.

A brief Zoom call would help me better understand the issue and gather information that could assist our developers in their investigation.

If you're interested, please feel free to schedule a time that works for you: https://autode.sk/jacob

Thank you for taking the time to report this, and I look forward to speaking with you.

[bhavani_sankuratri]

Hello @infoYYZLD 

Did the information provided by lance.carocci  and jacob.weinstock help you and answer your question? If yes, please click on the "Accept Solution" button. This will assist other community users in finding and benefiting from this information. If not, please do not hesitate to give an update in this thread so all community members receive an update on the progression of your question, and can suggest next steps that may be helpful for you to achieve what you're looking for.

[infoYYZLD]

Hello,

thank you for your response.

Regarding the document/project structure: our projects are structured in a standard and logical CAD way - individual parts, assemblies, subassemblies, and main assemblies. We do not consider exporting individual modules as lightweight/simplified versions to be a real solution here. That would be a workaround rather than a proper workflow, and in our opinion it is not a valid argument for this type of performance issue. The software should be able to handle normally structured mechanical/electronics projects without requiring this kind of manual workaround.

About modeled threads: yes, we do have modeled threads enabled in some places, but there are not many of them. I do not believe this should be the root cause of such severe performance problems, freezes, and huge RAM usage.

As for the comment about low CPU usage: this is also not consistent with what we are seeing. Just a few days ago I recorded a case where Fusion 360 used all available cores of an i7 13th gen CPU at 100% while opening a PCB project. Fusion was still not able to finish opening the project. The project could not be opened locally at all.

The only way we managed to recover it was by logging into Fusion through the web/browser version. There, the project opened. We made a tiny change, such as moving a track by 1 mil, only to be able to save the project again and push a new 3D version. After that, we tried opening the same project again on a desktop workstation. This time it took around 5 minutes, but at least it did not completely freeze the computer. CPU usage was around 50-70%, RAM usage was around 40 GB, and the project finally opened.

This is exactly what is strange: the behavior is completely random. Sometimes projects open immediately. Sometimes the same or similar projects freeze Fusion completely, consume enormous amounts of RAM, or overload the CPU.

The BIOS is already up to date on our machines.

In the meantime, Fusion received an update mentioning “performance”, and I must admit that the 3D environment seems slightly better now. However, in Electronics, during a normal working day, we still experience on average 2-3 random crashes. We send crash reports to Autodesk every time, but we do not know whether anyone actually analyzes them or whether they are connected to our case in any useful way.

Please also see the attached screenshot showing the system behavior while opening the mentioned project.

At this point, from our perspective, this does not look like a project-structure issue or a hardware issue. It looks like Fusion is simply not handling these?

[infoYYZLD]

No because there was no solution given there.

[infoYYZLD]

Guys take a look at that. Simple task- export of 3D pcb to .step file to be saved locally. Totally freezing up Autodesk Fusion and consuming strange pool of cpu + 35 Gigs of RAM. UI totally not responding in fusion/eagle/fusion electronics. Program stops responging - nothing to be done here. And please, do not propose to do export in the hub using web browser- this in not a solution, software proposes straight export and shoud deal with that with ease like KiCad does or Altium Designer. We and other customers pay for this business use of Fusion and this software does not work. This is quite alarming, company was about to expand the number of workers and designers using Fusion but now to be honest we started thinking if it makes any sense using Autodesk because there are huge problems that Fusion has and slows down the internal work by 300% in comparison to even free of charge KiCad. Where is the key?

[jacob.weinstock]

Hi @infoYYZLD It seems this board is very complex so please give it some time to export the step as there is likely thousands of bodies in this PCB. If possible can you export the F3Z/F3D file and upload here so the devs can analyse the file. Thanks in advance.

[infoYYZLD]

We were waiting over 10 minutes for that export. Then decided to record video as this oepration is hillarious. Performance of the program is SO BAD that this is most of the day unworkable. Also program failes when we create eg. change in 2d design, push to 3d model (works) then save, open up a 3D model based drawing which is obviously out of date and need update of the geometry, when we try to pull the changes via update- 2d drawing UI freezes and program stops responding. Guys, we PAY money for the software. It is not an opensource program so you should know why your software is not working- you developed that. This is not a huge board. 20 pages of hierarhical schematic only, under 150 partnumbers in BOM ~500 individual parts. most of them use private hub-based libraries and models. PCB is 4 layer about A4 page dimensional size.

[jacob.weinstock]

If you run the text command component.counts please tell me how many bodies there are. If you cant send any file to use for diagnosis then unfortunately we cannot help you with this issue. 

[lauri_barnhart]

Hi, @infoYYZLD.

Just checking in to see if you saw the outstanding request by jacob.weinstock and if you were able to provide the requested information. If you still require assistance, please let us know by commenting here. If you've managed to resolve your issue, please let us know that also by providing and update here.

Thanks,

[jonaszPXSUT]

Exporting an assembly consisting of several dozen components to a STEP file is practically impossible. The entire program freezes and shows no signs of activity.

[HughesTooling]

@infoYYZLD and @jonaszPXSUT A bug has been reported for exports, see this thread. The workaround for now seems to be to switch Fusion into offline mode while doing the export.