General Stability

[crewiscool]

I beg the Fusion 360 team to spend a few months working on general stability, tech debt, and instituting more robust testing before releases. Please! A great product is being ruined by awful QA.  For instance, for the current release (2.0.9011), I know of three areas where I can get the application to reliably crash and I discover new ones a couple times a week.  These aren't obscure functions either. Today the application crashed because I had the gall to open a new file, then crashed again as I attempted to update imported components.  For mature production software, this is unacceptable.  Further, it seems this problem is getting worse with time - not better. I know features drive excitement but for a business application reliability creates loyalty.   

[g-andresen]

Hi,

1. can you be more specific?

2. please show them in a screencast

günther

[jeff_strater]

I encourage you to send in the crash reports on every crash you encounter.  I did a search, and only see 3 reports from you in the past 30 days.  While that is, understandably, too many crashes, it does not seem to capture the entire range of problems you may have been seeing.  While it may seem as if those reports are not valuable, we do monitor them, and they can help us to help diagnose any problems you might be having.

The 3 reports that exist all point to the same problem - it seems to be something to do with updating the CAM assets from changes in an external component in the design.  Speaking about this particular problem, does it occur on one design, or have you experienced it on multiple design (that helps us decide if it is a general problem, or a data-specific one, in which case we may ask if you can share the design with our team, confidentially, of course).

[r.moss]

Crewiscool, I think you make a good point.  

It is good to see the feedback on this forum but I have no sense of whether AutoDesk are "winning the battle" or whether bugs are popping up Wack-a-Mole style faster than they can be remedied.    I found two bugs yesterday (one I think from this latest update) and I wasn't doing anything terribly fancy.  I'm happy to report them but it would be nice if there was some list of "known bugs" so one could tell (a) whether it was worthwhile making a screencast and reporting it and (b) could gain some satisfaction (perhaps via email notification) when each bug got fixed.

Conversely it's equally annoying when Fusion 360 seems to lack a few features that would enhance the ease of use (e.g. I'd like sortable user parameter lists, access to user parameters from linked components and ability to use sketches from linked components); I can see both sides to this.

[Phil.E]

@r.moss Fusion can already do much of what you are asking.

http://help.autodesk.com/view/fusion360/ENU/?guid=GUID-45D1A42F-8081-47AA-914C-28FDAB0B09CD

Derive is what you want to try. It can do the things you are talking about for linked items. Sketches, parameters, etc.

Also edit in place can take care of much of those workflows for linked designs.

http://help.autodesk.com/view/fusion360/ENU/?guid=ASM-EDIT-IN-PLACE

Here are the commands supported by Edit in Place.

http://help.autodesk.com/view/fusion360/ENU/?guid=ASM-EDIT-IN-PLACE-SUPPORTED-COMMANDS

If you want to see a list of bugs, use the search function here:

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/fusion-360-support/bd-p/962

Be sure to check the dates on the posts because old posts are almost never closed and many people end up reporting "bugs" on very old posts that are totally unrelated. If you just want to post a bug, do so because we read every post and respond to as many as we can.

Thanks for your engagement!

[r.moss]

Phil,

Thanks, I'll try Derive; didn't realise it did that.

Roger

[crewiscool]

 All bugs don't result in a crash. Frequently they result in the application simply hanging for very long period ( I usually try to give it 10+ minutes although workflow doesn't always permit), and just simple annoying UI hiccups. That being said I managed to make it crash again today by simply trying to edit a component in place. Prior to that, the component just couldn't be made visible - it took the crash to bring it back. 

This is a decent exemplar, I think a lot of new code has gone into the edit in place functionality and it has introduced a bunch of regression bugs in the external component functionality. While edit in place is awesome, delaying a release to do more regression testing seems like it would have created a more stable release and wouldn't have dampened the enthusiasm for edit in place with the new instability in external components.

With regards to UI hiccups. Yesterday, I selected a body and couldn't let go of it (it stayed attached to my pointer). For as long as I can remember trying to reorder CAM operations fails about 50% of the time.  For about 3 release when you moused over a CAM chevron it would disappear and when you clicked to expanded it would select the operation and try to drag it around rather than just opening to show details. 

While this is complex software and all software will have some bugs when it ships, it feels like you are pushing beta features to production and not ever sweeping up lingering technical debt. These aren't deep hidden edge conditions, they front and center vanilla software bugs that should be caught in test - most through well written automated unit or integration test.

They last thing I will say, is that end of my workflow (and I assume many others), I post and trust your software to guide a very expensive machine. Thankfully, and to your credit, that part seems extremely stable and reliable. But instability in the rest of the software is starting to give me pause on whether I should continue to trust the CAM operations.     

[Phil.E]

Can you try some of your workflows on another machine to see if your performance related issues go away?

[crewiscool]

My computer is a 2018 (not 2008) Macbook Pro with an Intel i7 2.2 GHz with 16 GB RAM and Radeon Pro 555X graphics cared w/ 4GB of onboard RAM.

Last year I switched over to a PC running windows 10 for a time but experienced the same instability so I switched back.

[Phil.E]

Thanks.

[crewiscool]

I have found a new bug, I have now experienced two crashes while opening STEP files. 

[Phil.E]

Hi,

The last 5 crash reports from you have all been the same problem. STEP translation is crashing.

This indicates two possibilities:

1. You are trying to open corrupt step files.

2. Fusion is crashing while translating normal step files.

Are the last 5 crashes you've sent all related to one particular file?

Thanks,

[TrippyLighting]

You've been asked for data and there are ways to share this privately if you don't want to share it here publicly on the forum.

[crewiscool]

Phil,

This indicates two bugs now instead of one. I exported a STEP file from Fusion 360 to deliver to customer, and was reimporting it to make sure it was satisfactory.

This indicates:

1. There is a bug in Fusion 360 STEP file creation code that causes it to create corrupt STEP files.

2. There is a bug in Fusion 360 STEP parsing code that causes it to crash rather than gracefully error when STEP parsing errors arise....

Happy to send the file privately to you if you would like, but it isn't these individual errors I am really concerned about. I have found work arounds for both of them, it's that next month there will be two more, and new ones the month after that and that the trend-line, at least anecdotally, seems to indicate increasing instability.

I know this is probably the wrong forum for a strategic complaint like. If there is better one, please advise. All I know is that if  I was the product owner, I would want this kind of feed-back, either as a wake up call, or as proof-point that the customer base would gladly take slower functionality delivery for more core capability stability.

[Phil.E]

So it sounds like you have one file, is that correct? 

To be clear:

You exported one file as step

You tried to open it again to check

You crashed 5 times opening this one file

Is that true? If so that's great. The problem with this crash bucket is it's impossible to reproduce. We've asked customers for files before and each time it doesn't reproduce the crash on our machines, indicating a hardware  problem on the customer side, or temporary sytem state or even geometry related trouble. It's definitely not a general stability problem, otherwise every step file would fail to translate this way. 

I think these are assumptions about general stability based on recent experiences. In any case, if we can reproduce the crash or bug, the likelihood that it can be fixed goes up dramatically. It would be nice to reproduce this step file crash at all.

I take it you've tried to reproduce the problem? If you export the same one design as step again, does that design also fail to open/translate again? If it happens with this one design, but not others, it would indicate something in the model geometry to look for.

I'll send you an email and please send back the design I should expect to crash if I try to open it. Thanks for your help.

[crewiscool]

Phil,

A) It is not a couple of data points. You are choosing to focus on a couple of data point from the last two weeks. That is a classic strawman argument.

B) I would love to see some of the data from the thousands of users of Fusion 360 that show declining crash dumps and/or bug reports.  Until that is provided I can only go off of my limited experience that indicates that the application has always been a bit brittle, and as the product matures and should be becoming more stable, it is staying just as unstable if not becoming less stable.

C) You have mentioned "hardware" problems on the customer side twice now as a reason for the software crashing. That is not a thing - especially with modern hardware, OSes, kernels, and drivers.  Short of a kernel panic, there is always a way to fail elegantly and catch exceptions without dropping the entire application.

Regardless, I have said my piece. Expressed my concerns. Thank your time and responses. 

[Phil.E]

Thanks. Please let me know if you can reproduce the issue. Always glad to test it out. Since this is seemingly data dependent it's going to take a reproducible case based on a design file to fix this.

[service.jlhannangroup]

@Phil.E I am also experiencing stability issues, on 2 different computers(both less than 2 years old, different manufactures and specs, one higher end consumer, one workstation grade), also trying 2 different paid subscription accounts. Issues started at the same time on both computers. It has happened with both simple and complex geometries, and simple and complex toolpaths. It happens just switching from design to manufacturing workspaces! Both computers are fast when doing anything else, but in Fusion, get lag, "black screen" issues, much more "thinking", and lasting much longer. I have kept both Windows and all drivers up to date, and also tried uninstalling and reinstalling Fusion 360. I could possibly buy into this being my computer, if it was happening to just one, but I have 2, as well as the many others who have voiced having problems on the forums and social media! For Fusion to perform well up until this point, then both computers having issues at the same time? Highly unlikely! This started back in September, and has not improved with October updates, now has gotten worst! I have bodies that are not visible, but when the mouse goes over them it makes their outline appear and it is making it impossible to select the geometry I am actually trying to. I have work that needs to be programmed so I can it on machines!

[Phil.E]

Thanks, and I suppose with a title like "General Stability" this post would attract all sorts of different issues.

What you describe is not the same issue the original post is describing. It might do better to create a stand alone post, you'll get your own questions answered that way.

It sounds like you need to contact customer support, as a paying customer you should always do that when you face issues like you are describing. Have you contacted support?