Large Assemblies Fail To Open With Cleared Cache

[ezrascott]

Our company has over 20 users in Fusion 360. We have quite a few assemblies for our machines that have over 1000 parts in them. We build these assemblies by first building sub-assemblies and then combining the sub-assemblies in an overarching full assembly.

The first time one of these full assemblies is built the user typically has no issue creating it however if the PC's cache is ever cleared (which our team does often to try and fix issues with loading times) the assembly typically fails to open.

I discovered today that I can get Fusion 360 to open one of these full assemblies by first opening all of the sub-assemblies individually. I have been able to create this pretty consistently so I figured this would be a good issue for the developers to look into fixing as it causes a lot of wasted time at our company.

[Phil.E]

Have you ever filed a customer support ticket for this?

[ezrascott]

I have not but I can do so if that would be the best way to go about it! 😊

[Phil.E]

https://www.autodesk.com/support/contact-support

Yes, because ultimately our support staff is best prepared to answer the question and or log a case for it.

[TrippyLighting]

I might have mentioned this is a previous thread, but I'd love to take a look at your large assemblies.

Can you elaborate what a "large: assembly is?

How many unique components with a timeline are in it?

How many imported components (just geometry and no timeline) etc.

I work with often very large assembly with thousands of components ( my biggest project so far had over 6000) and some operations can get pretty slow, but the symptoms you describe are rather odd and I've not seen those reported here on the forum! 

[Phil.E]

@ezrascott I should mention, have you considered not clearing cache on your machines?

The first time one of these full assemblies is built the user typically has no issue creating it however if the PC's cache is ever cleared (which our team does often to try and fix issues with loading times) the assembly typically fails to open.

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When there is no local cache, the first thing that happens is Fusion builds the local cache again. This requires lots of time to download the designs from the cloud as you open them. When there is a local cache, built by the activity of working on designs on a particular machine, the cache is the design file. Getting rid of it necessarily will cause longer time at file-open, because the local cache is much faster than downloading it from the cloud.

[ezrascott]

Sadly I would not be able to share anything outside of our organization without an NDA in place

[ezrascott]

The biggest reason we clear cache is there are instances where our machines cannot open files and will hang for 5 minutes or even indefinitely. This is a separate issue that we are working with Autodesk on right now. Clearing cache helps with the odds of the files actually opening. We cannot simply stop clearing cache until the opening hang is fixed. That issue is linked here: https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/fusion-360-support/unacceptably-slow-load-and-save-times/m-p/11573402...

Regarding this particular issue I will be putting in a support ticket to get that moving.

[Phil.E]

To be sure I'm hearing you correctly.

• Assemblies fail to open unless you clear cache
• Assemblies fail to open if you clear cache

These sound like the same problem, and the cache has nothing to do with it. Is there more I should know?

[ezrascott]

1. Most drawings fail to open unless you clear cache or force stop fusion. This is captured here: https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/fusion-360-support/unacceptably-slow-load-and-save-times/m-p/11573402... . I put in a case. The case was closed and I was told ticket ATEAM-40180 was passed to the development team but we have heard nothing about progress on this.

2. Assemblies fail to open if you have cleared cache. I am putting a ticket in for this now. I have been experimenting with opening them and it appears if I force fusion to sync the assembly in cache by selecting "add to offline cache" it fixes the issue.

[Phil.E]

There is progress on that ATEAM ticket. Have you tried opening drawings lately without clearing cache to confirm it is still a problem for you?

[ezrascott]

Excellent. Yes my team is still seeing this issue with basically every drawing we have in our project, drawing complexity does not appear to affect it either. It could be a single or multi-page drawing, large or small, and it still happens.

Also I just put the ticket in for the large assembly cache issue. It's not a huge issue as I have found a workaround but I want to make sure I keep reporting issues to the Fusion team as we have over 20 people at our company that use it. 😊