Fusion360 Constantly Spamming launchdarkley.com

[maxg90]

Currently, fusion 360 will CONTINUOUSLY spam launchdarkley.com - over 1.3 million connections attempts and counting: 

 This is not acceptable in a product that costs 60+ dollars per month! 

[lance.carocci]

@maxg90, can you please include your application logs? This should help show which event is requesting the service. I would expect it to retry, but not this frequently.

Ultimately, LaunchDarkly is required to enable some application functionality, so I do not recommend blocking the endpoint.

[scott.denman]

This is an honestly unacceptable answer for modern software.

It is an anti-pattern to 1: spam a remote endpoint endlessly with no backoff, and 2: to require network connectivity to get the status of a feature flag to launch your software when you advertise an “offline mode”.

At at minimum you need to have default states of feature flags embedded, and then the latest version cached, so you can support offline mode correctly.

I’m on a plane where my phone has connectivity but not my laptop. I needed to restart fusion due to another annoying bug (the mouse input randomly goes completely wonky. Been an issue for ages and still isn’t fixed yet…), but now I can’t start it up because the app spins with the little rainbow cursor and a log file that will increase in size indefinitely while fusion tries to call launchdarkly.

I don’t know how fusion works under the hood but this is software engineering 101- fail safe in the event that non-critical dependencies are not available. Your feature flag service is by definition non-critical.

Please fix this massive bug instead of condescendingly telling users to not block third party urls because you can’t build your software correctly.

[lance.carocci]

@scott.denman, it's standard practice for us to request logs in order to identify where the problem lies, as this experience is not intentional. Whether you have forced Fusion into Offline Mode or physically disconnected your internet, it's not by-design that they hold up initialization until they time out, they are supposed to retry silently in the background.

Please note, however, that Fusion is far from offline software just because it has an Offline toggle. The software is cloud-based, first-and-foremost. Offline mode exists because we know travel or areas without internet is the reality of life, but the app is not designed to run in Offline mode by default or indefinitely, and it is not designed to run with cloud endpoints blocked.

[maxg90]

It's okay, I'll just switch to a different CAD vendor. 

Literally making 100s of connections per second is insane. Pretty shocked by Lance's refusal to acknowledge that pinging a random 3rd party service 100s of times per second is okay. If these connections were going through and there was say a parsing error in the response, you would be performing a pretty effective DDOS attack. 

Fusion360 makes _so many_ random connections to 3rd party services....

https://dnie9zy2a5op.cloudfront.net/ could be straight up malware for all we know. 

[lance.carocci]

@maxg90, again, without your logs it is difficult to know what is causing 100s of requests a second - nothing should be spamming that heavily, as we cache that information specifically to reduce repeat traffic like this, and we should give up and refer to defaults eventually, but it sounds like that might not be happening.

While I understand you would rather block these endpoints entirely, you might check Fusion's Required Ports and Domains list any time a domain looks unfamiliar to you.

Out of curiosity, why are you blocking these endpoints? If it's a matter of privacy/tracking, Fusion 360 has an opt-out for analytics and tracking within the application Preferences, if that alleviates any concern. In fact, I believe we are refreshing this experience in an upcoming release.

[scott.denman]

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@lance.carocci wrote:

@scott.denman, it's standard practice for us to request logs in order to identify where the problem lies, as this experience is not intentional. Whether you have forced Fusion into Offline Mode or physically disconnected your internet, it's not by-design that they hold up initialization until they time out, they are supposed to retry silently in the background.

Requesting log files is fine, though in this case they swell up to several hundred megabytes over the span of a few minutes. I can confirm that it does hold up initialization, and the same line keeps being emitted in the logs (I'll happily provide a snippet when I'm able to). Maybe the app is crash-looping at another point after it writes the log statement, but wasn't emitting any other details about where that might be. I could see the launchdarkly logs being a red-herring in this case. Hopefully y'all can get to the root of this bug soon 🙂

Please note, however, that Fusion is far from offline software just because it has an Offline toggle.

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Either it can or it can't.  If enough has migrated to the cloud that the software is unusable without it, then get rid of offline mode, and make sure people know that it is 100% required to use the software. It'll save a lot of frustration with folks who think they are getting a traditional desktop application. Call it "Fusion Cloud" or something, I'm not a marketing expert.

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Offline mode exists because we know travel or areas without internet is the reality of life, but the app is not designed to run in Offline mode by default or indefinitely, and it is not designed to run with cloud endpoints blocked.

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So again, let's make sure that if you're building an offline mode into the software, that it is well tested and supported. If Autodesk isn't going to do that, then kill the feature off and be honest about how this software is entirely dependent on an internet connection and Autodesk services. From my experience, the software can not start up without an internet connection, so it's useless offline to me.

As far as blocking cloud endpoints, I expect software to be communicating directly with *.autodesk.com, not random third-party URLs directly. In the former case, it would be obvious what was happening, and I would be 100% okay with not blocking those endpoints. Even with options to "opt-out" of things like tracking and analytics, it's perfectly valid to completely block unknown endpoints instead of trusting a vendor's "promise".

[lance.carocci]

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Please include the full logs, not just a snippet - there may be information before and after the spam that may be relevant. Ideally, export a diagnostic archive directly from Fusion and attach it here.

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It'll save a lot of frustration with folks who think they are getting a traditional desktop application.

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I'll pass this feedback along to the marketing team. Our Product Overview tries to make it clear that Fusion 360 is cloud-based, but there may be opportunities to clarify unclear wording.

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As far as blocking cloud endpoints, I expect software to be communicating directly with *.autodesk.com, not random third-party URLs directly. In the former case, it would be obvious what was happening, and I would be 100% okay with not blocking those endpoints. Even with options to "opt-out" of things like tracking and analytics, it's perfectly valid to completely block unknown endpoints instead of trusting a vendor's "promise".

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It is uncommon for cloud software, or even a single webpage, to communicate with a single domain - this is in part because most HTTP traffic is limited to a set number of maximum simultaneous communications per domain, and we want to communicate faster than that limit allows. We consume and license components and code from other companies, or utilize their servers for distributed hosting and minimizing service downtime, and users agree to consume those endpoints as part of the Terms of Service. When in doubt, you can review our list of domains required for product access if you are unsure if a domain is legitimate, or reach out to product support.

On that note - I notice our list does not include Cloudfront. Do you have any addins installed for Fusion? Have you accessed any external webpages in the embedded browsers, such as McMaster-Carr or Parts4CAD? These websites may use their own hosts, and that browser traffic will show as coming from Fusion 360.

[maxg90]

I've switched from Fusion360 to Solidworks, it is much cheaper and does not have the same bugs so far. You can close this issue. 

[lance.carocci]

Without your application logs, I'm sorry to say that I was unable to confirm and reproduce the issue as described. For QAs and product support everywhere, I kindly ask that you include this information with any future support cases, be they for Autodesk or Dassault.