Performance

john_rousseau

Since the start of 2019, we've been cranking up the effort in engineering to improve Onshape performance. We definitely know that it's a big concern for some of our customers. In 2018 we made major investments toward improving our ability to detect and fix performance concerns. We've also improved and streamlined our support and customer success processes around reporting performance problems. The past 3 releases have rolled out many of these improvements and we have many more coming. In 2019 we are focusing a substantially increased amount of engineering time on improving the performance of large assemblies, drawings, and overall interactivity.

In the old CAD and PDM world, getting a performance problem fixed could take many months or years (if it got fixed at all) and a lot of effort on your part. With Onshape, we have the ability to identify and reproduce performance issues in hours and can fix severe ones within a few weeks, sometimes even days. Customers experiencing unexpected slowdowns merely need to create a support ticket. If you let us know what document you are working on (reporting from within the document will do this automatically), what you were doing when you saw the problem, and what time you saw it, we can start investigating right away.

I know that some customers are still struggling with performance issues. We recognize this and will continue to improve performance as one of our top priorities.

john_mcclary

Great news

Josiah_Harthcock

Yes!

brucebartlett

This great news to hear that you are focusing on performance, faster more efficient CAD is always welcome to increase user output. You have already mastered zero crashes and seamless upgrades using the cloud platform and harnessing this platform to make Onshape X times faster than tradition CAD system is very much welcome.  I must say however that with my latest projects I spent a lot less time messing with stuff because of performance issues, which gives me confidence that even over the last 6 months performance in the backend has been improved.  

owen_sparks

Well said @brucebartlett.

I hope that we as users are also helping ourselves to a small degree by improving our modelling practices over time too. Looking back at how I did many things only a year ago is a cringe-fest!

@philip_thomas. A while back you hosted a great webinar on modelling strategies to optimise performance. I'm curious as to whether the recent updates would incur any changes to those best practices?

Cheers, Ogden.
Screw it, if autocorrect wants me to be called Ogden then today I'm rolling with it.

john_mcclary

Even today, on the Modeling side of Onshape.

When I go back to SW the difference in performance between Onshape and SW is night and day.
Every so often Onshape hits a lag spike and may take 5 minutes to regenerate an assembly.
But SW takes a 2 minute break every 10 minutes JUST for a save command.

Onshape's efficiency is phenomenal compared to desktop CAD. Just need to get paperspace  up to par with model space. 

philip_thomas

@owen_sparks - Everything in the webinar still holds true - and in fact will make Onshape even faster in light of these changes.
Even doing nothing, Onshape will be faster. We parallelized section views a few months ago. With 1.96, assembly open is now parallelized and also in 1.96 was a newly optimized drawing view creation algorithm that has been measured at up to twice as fast.
No other CAD platform period has been parallelized on a wide scale and there is plenty more to come. On the server side, there are a number of performance projects on the way and on the OPS side, with more than 7,000,000 production hours of performance data to mine, JR's team are planning some significant ops improvements that will benefit groups collaborating globally.  Each of you is on the winning team, nothing else is even close. Are we perfect? No, but every 3 weeks we learn more and deliver more. Onshape is an amazing platform and is going from strength to strength!!!!

john_mcclary

Well said @philip_thomas
This bud's for you. 
Anyone from Onshape ever find themselves near Grand Rapids, MI let me know. I owe a few of you a couple rounds

philip_thomas

@john_mcclary - I will take you up on that one day!

john_mcclary

I hope so

sebastian_glanzner

My biggest assembly loads very fast now after the latest update! 
Onshape is amazing and the support is the best!

owen_sparks

@philip_thomas - Great to hear, thanks for the explanation.

@john_mcclary - PT is Welsh-ish and therefore familiar with beer.  Please don't use the words Budweiser and beer in the same sentence ever again.  That's like a Brit talking about instant coffee  

john_mcclary

Lol

brian_brady

john_mcclary said:

Well said @philip_thomas
This bud's for you. 
Anyone from Onshape ever find themselves near Grand Rapids, MI let me know. I owe a few of you a couple rounds

I'm not from Onshape, but I'm close to GR. I teach at a small public university in Big Rapids. You may have heard of us. If you are ever looking for Onshape native new college graduates let me know. I teach modeling with Onshape to our 3rd year Mechanical Engineering Technology students and they generally love using it. Some get quite good.

Brian

john_mcclary

Cool, didn't realize anyone else on the internet is this side of the state

We are keeping our eyes open for another CAD jockey. Can't promise much Onshape work yet though, there is still a stigma held between 2 non-believers about Onshape. They prefer to listen to testimonials from long time SW and Fusion users, that only gave Onshape a couple hour test drive. Rather than the living breathing guy sitting 1 seat over that has lived it for 2 years... 

But have them fill out an app if they are interested. What's the worse that can happen?
The owner here loves Onshape, but the company is split 2:3 in favor of SW still... so having another knowledgeable person could be a good thing.

owen_sparks

I'm curious if anyone has done a remote job interview in a shared Onshape session? Employer sets a brief, candidate builds it in real time with the employer in the doc watching and jumping in to help out out or offer clarification as required. Try that in confusion180 or Sometimesworks 😀
Owen S.

jakeramsley

owen_sparks said:

I'm curious if anyone has done a remote job interview in a shared Onshape session? Employer sets a brief, candidate builds it in real time with the employer in the doc watching and jumping in to help out out or offer clarification as required. Try that in confusion180 or Sometimesworks 😀
Owen S.

I'm obviously biased, but I have.  We had a group of recent and soon-to-be-recent graduates work on a project together for 3 weeks to test their design skills but more importantly for me their willingness to record, document, and send feedback of issues/be critical of the product.  It was quite nice to be able to jump in at anytime and see their progress (or lack there of).

john_mcclary

jakeramsley said

 It was quite nice to be able to jump in at anytime and see their progress (or lack there of).

Are you saying you know who the procrastinators are now 

lawrence_housel

We have Professional accounts but our shop floor guys are on free accounts for viewing.  Drawings seem to take longer to load for the free accounts than the paid accounts.

Is performance throttled for free accounts vs. paid accounts?  

TimRice

lawrence_housel said:

We have Professional accounts but our shop floor guys are on free accounts for viewing.  Drawings seem to take longer to load for the free accounts than the paid accounts.

Is performance throttled for free accounts vs. paid accounts?  

There are a number of factors here. However, we do not "throttle" performance based on plan types. Please feel free to ask those users to submit a support ticket and we can walk them through some possible issues. You can also ask them to perform the check cad.onshape.com/check on their devices to measure the device performance.

sebastian_glanzner

lawrence_housel said:

Drawings seem to take longer to load for the free accounts than the paid accounts.

Drawing load times are longer on slower cpus.
One time I reduced the cpu performance of my laptop to reduce the noise of the fans and I noticed that immediately. 

I would guess that the computers on the shop floor are less performant than CAD Workstations?

lawrence_housel

Thank you for the information.  

The shop floor guys all use iPads.  The issue came to light when someone from Operations switched from a Pro to a Free account and noticed a dip in performance.  We thought it might be related to the account type.