Open ToolpathSettingForm Is Toooooo Slow！！！

[jjat-wang]

I use Powermill Since version 2016

Each update will make the opening of the  setting Form slower

I am using version 2020 Now

It takes 4 to 5 seconds to open a different strategy each time

It makes me very anxious while waiting

I think most of the others in the forum also find it very slow

If it is to open the same strategy, he is very fast

This shows that the parameter reading is very fast, the problem lies in refactoring the UI

I had to make a plugin myself to change this situation

But to support all strategies, his workload is huge

And I’m a Cs beginner, so I only improve half the efficiency

So I look forward to the official priority to solve this problem

I submitted support very early in 2017

But did not get the correct solution，Which support was automatically closed afterwards

And my Pc is  Dell  Precision 7820 tower

InterR Xeon Gold 6128 cpu @3.40GHz

NVDIA Quadro P4000

PowerMill install in SSD

Attach a comparison video

[jjat-wang]

https://autode.sk/347VQOc

I can’t seem to insert the video

[TK.421]

Please keep complaining to support. They know of this issue, and they know what is causing it. They've told me that "it is too much for us to fix" "it would take too much work to do it" 

the only way this will get remedied is if enough paying customers complain often enough and loud enough for them to have no choice but to do it. 

[Alex470]

When you see the rate that functionalities are implemented in powermill vs fusion 360, you can guess where "paying customers" money is going. 

Don't get me wrong, PM is an amazing product but for how long... 

In the meantime Featurecam got one "new" check box in 2022...

https://help.autodesk.com/view/FCAM/2022/ENU/?guid=FCAM_RELEASE_NOTES_NEW_FEATURES

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/featurecam-forum/featurecam-2022/td-p/10307510

My two cents

[cheidenfelder]

They actually told you they know how to fix it but it's too much work?  

[TK.421]

This is what they said in part, "We believe a change in an update to Windows 10 some time ago made this problem significantly worse. But the route cause is the original choices in how this form is engineered. Like I said, unfortunately, addressing that now would require a major commitment."

The rest of the thread is them saying they'll focus on newer features, to which the feedback was mostly "fix this instead".

I would rather have faster forms than a new feature, but I am just one paying customer...

[cheidenfelder]

I don't even know what to say about  "that would require a major commitment".  

[Benjamin.Br]

As those are my words being quoted there, I want to also note that conversation thread ended with me saying that we would review this issue again. And that is indeed what we are going to do. I can't make any promises about the outcome but we are prioritising another investigation to see if there is anything we can do to address this problem in the short term. We do understand that this is a significant frustration for many customers. Previous investigations have shown that the only way to truly deal with this would be a major reengineering of a significant area of PowerMill.

[TK.421]

@Benjamin.Br When you have tons of customers complaining about this over several years I don't know what else you can do but fix it.  Throwing more features at us to pacify us is not the answer. Listening to your stakeholders and responding to their needs is. If Autodesk continues to ignore this issue, that leads me then to my bigger question: how much longer will PowerMill be around? It's clear that a lot of the good stuff from PowerMill has made it's way into Fusion360; how long until Autodesk mothballs one or the other? 

Back to the issue though: $6400 or $9000 a year for PowerMill. Multiply that now by the number of licenses out there. To me, that adds up to more than enough resources to remedy this issue. The line "this would be a major reengineering of a significant area of PowerMill" is a cop out; that tells me where the the future of PowerMill is headed...

[cfastNJWK6]

I 100% agree with @TK.421 .  We are paying for over 40 seats of PowerMill.  Imagine how many times per day the toolpath settings form is opened in our shop.  Now multiply that by 10-30 seconds.  We are losing hours everyday waiting for a form to open.  I understand how updating a toolpath's algorithm would be a "major commitment".  I don't understand how simply opening a form requires a major overhaul of the software.  If that truly is the case, there are likely other major problem areas in code for PowerMill.  If the developers are hesitant to fix known issues, I'm going to become more hesitant to renew our subscription.

[jjat-wang]

It takes more than five years for a problem to be unresolved

Although I said I am a newbie in Cs development

I don’t know if you watched the connection video I added

But believe me, as long as you give me time, I can make a form comparable to the original

Fast and beautiful

Has your development department fired all developers，At least a few maintenance personnel

[RAL6000]

Maybe they have not fired them but focused them to Fusion stuff 😞
For the Robot Plugin.. back in the days a very important part for PowerMill they are changing nothing since years. Even some easy things regarding modulo calculations as part of postprocessing has not ben touched since i reported this as an issue. [PMILL-14813]

I start to loose trust in the development process and thinking as @TK.421 if PowerMill will be canceled during the next decade... 

Hopefully i´m wrong and in the background Autodesk is working on PM and not only on Fusion..

[jjat-wang]

As far as i know

Most of Delcam's employees in China have been laid off

I know several sales consultants and technical experts, and they went to Tebis together.

And recommended to our company

[BearArms]

I know a couple years ago many people here was complaining about how slow PM is. We all said "speed, speed speed". That is how we compete. In our company we don't use all the new gadgets, but we need PM to be as fast as it can be. Before, not many years ago the forms pulled up instantly. Now it is panful to wait seconds just for a form to appear. Autodesk needs to fix this quick. As I've seen now, 2022 is the same way. I'm sure there are many users out there that are just using this without saying anything, but are disgusted with the performance. 

[cfastNJWK6]

Absolutely! Between the time it takes to open forms and constantly "Saving Stockmodel" even though no changes have been made to the stockmodel, there is a ton of time spent waiting on the software.

[iamcdn79]

How does everyone like the new save feature when importing a model? It will save every toolpath, model and stock model in the project when nothing was changed to it. That is by design now.

[cfastNJWK6]

What version did this start in?

[iamcdn79]

I noticed it 3 yrs ago, thought it was a bug. Reached out to support last week about it and the reply from development...

"That is expected behavior. When you import a new model the machining context for already calculated toolpaths has changed. If for some reason you need to recalculate one of those toolpaths there can be a problem as new surfaces are in the model. PowerMill marks the toolpaths as being 'dirty' and requiring recalculation or updates the 'ignored' surfaces parameters. The change that was made for 2022 was to split the saving of the parameters and the geometry. So saving the 'dirty' toolpaths will be a fraction of the time it would have taken prior to 2022. There is a caveat however in that in order to do that the first time the parameters and the geometry have to be saved. So for projects created prior to 2021 the first time will equivalent to pre-2022. Thereafter, and for projects post-2022 the time taken to save will only be that of saving the parameters."

[cfastNJWK6]

Wow.  Something as simple as a message box saying "Some toolpaths require recalculation because of new model surfaces. Would you like to recalculate and save now?"  would have saved a lot of headaches.  

Note to software developers... Before changing core functionality of a software, let the users of the software know, or better yet, give them the option to retain the old functionality.  I understand that a lot of changes are part of a bigger picture, but your customers are operating on thin margins as it is.  Any additional time that is wasted is just eating into ever shrinking profits.

[iamcdn79]

It makes no sense at all. If you're going to import a model into a project 99.9% of the time it's not going to affect the toolpaths that were already calculated, its imported for the new toolpath that needs calculating, like a cap surface or extended surface to prevent rolling the edge of a model. This was never a problem in previous versions of Powermill.

This is just another waste of time added into Powermill on top of the slow toolpath form loading issue.