drawing performance

david_macmillan98994

Glad to be a part of the alpha Drawings program.

The primary difficulty that I'm having in the Drawings Studio (is it a "Studio"?) is performance during interactions.  Clicking-and-dragging a view, for example, can take 10+ seconds (with the view disappearing during most of this).  Text in Notes appears at a rate of 3-5 seconds per character (makes me nostalgic for my 110 baud acoustic coupler.)  Other interactions are similarly slow.  These don't sound like long delays, but they really get in the way of effective work.  (At the beginning, when I didn't yet know what would happen, they were quite confusing - I'd assume that nothing had happened, and then it would happen after I went on to the next thing.)

The explanation, I think, is my slow, rural, Internet connection.  (It's a microwave radio link to the top of the feed mill in a nearby village - yes, really.)  But much of the country is still connected over similar slow connections, and the situation is getting worse rather than better.  I'm also running rather modest hardware (a 4 year old entry-level Lenovo laptop), but I don't think that is the problem.  If I bring up a CPU monitor and a network monitor to check Drawing operations, the CPU always has capacity to spare, but the net connection is saturated. (Software environment: Arch Linux and Chrome.)

If this were my first (or only) exposure to Onshape, I'd just conclude that cloud-based CAD isn't for me.  But these performance issues don't appear in the Parts/Assemblies Studios.  There I can work with pretty complicated parts and assemblies with no real performance issues at all (and relatively little net traffic).  There are pauses, of course, but in (say) a Parts Studio these are always at well-defined points between interactions (e.g., updating the model) and are always signalled clearly by a spinning wait indicator.  The actual interactions are completely smooth.

I know that you folks are working at top speed on Drawings, and that features take priority at the moment (+1 for GD&T!)
But to the extent that it is possible, reducing Drawings bandwith requirements to match the other Studios would really help.

Problems aside, thanks to all at Onshape for making this a very impressive product.

David M. MacMillan

andrew_troup

I have these problems even on fast connections with high-end hardware. It's not just a little slow: it's frankly unusable even with simple parts.
I'm on the other side of the world from Onshape's servers, which presumably doesn't help with latency issues.

I'm hoping Onshape can pull some rabbits out of hats on the Drawing front, because I think it will prove a lot harder than most people would expect, and I'm personally pretty underwhelmed with the overall capability at this stage (not just slow performance, but limited usability). I filled out the first-week questionnaire to this effect, and invited Onshape to contact me and discuss, but that has still not happened ... And I'm not sure I would be much help to them now, because it has not been feasible to keep trying to produce useful output, so many of my first impressions have faded. When I have to build something from an Onshape design, I use screenshots and sketch dimensions.

The enthusiasm even on this early-adopter section of the forum seems somewhat muted, and I can't help wondering if Onshape burned their fingers by releasing this module under EV too soon.

bobminer

@andrew_troup @david_macmillan98994 Those of you involved with Onshape from the early days might remember that performance and functionality have significantly improved for part studios and assemblies since then.  You are correct that the performance and functionality of drawings is lagging part studios and assemblies.  But we are working hard and improving drawings, using the same techniques we used for part studios and assemblies.  We released drawings a bit early because we understood that some users were blocked without drawings and we wanted to unblock them, so they could get their drawings made.  Drawings will steadily improve in both performance and functionality each update, as for part studios and assemblies.

chrisjh777

Onshape drawing performance has deteriorated significantly in the last couple of weeks, to the point of being unusable.  I suspect the servers are not up to the traffic demand.  Is there a plan to install local servers in each continent?

pete_yodis

@chrisjh777Where are you located?

chrisjh777

pete_yodis said:

@chrisjh777Where are you located?

Brisbane, Australia.

don_howe

I'm located in the NE Ohio area and there was always lag time when entering dimensions. When I use the Chrome browser it seems to be better than FF. With that said some of my first impressions have faded as well by that I mean I was all set to highly recommend this to the company management as a viable alternative to SW, but Onshape isn't there yet and I can't recommend it for production work. Otherwise, I'm very impressed with Onshape's progress and some of the improvements that have been made. I use OS mostly for my hobby work. 

daniel_chow

chrisjh777 said:

Onshape drawing performance has deteriorated significantly in the last couple of weeks, to the point of being unusable.  I suspect the servers are not up to the traffic demand.  Is there a plan to install local servers in each continent?

Hey Chris, I just tried it ... onShape drawing and studio still works with NO internet connection. I used a wifi connection to load my parts, then shut it down. I was able to edit the parts on my screen but not much else. Drawing from my experience as a network guy and also my experience in development (formerly known as "programming"), this is what I would expect. 

Its like writing an email. If you loose your internet connection, its likely that you can still continue to write the email, edit it but not send it or load other emails. 

Its like Google Docs, if you loose your internet connection, you can still edit your files but can't save it or load other files. 

I'm going to guess that onShape server is responsible for storing / syncing your data. But the actual program runs from your client / desktop / notebook computer. So the speed at which you can draw and use the app depends on the specifications of your computer or device. WebGL and Javascript runs on your local machine. I'm not sure what the link is between your experience using onShape and its connection to the onShape servers. 

What IS possible is if onShape can write more efficient algorithms that use less processor resources, that will make it faster. Anyways, I'm just speculating ... this is how a typical web application works. They store the data, but the actual program runs on the client computer.

andrew_troup

@daniel_chow

That's not my understanding, or my experience (the moment I shut down any internet connection, I get "Onshape is not connected. Your document is saved." and the window takes on a blue cast and becomes inactive) 

I wonder if your wifi switched (without your knowledge) to another station (or reconnected without you realising)? There is no Onshape executable running on the local machine: every single action is saved in real time on their servers.

Someone with deeper understanding may put me straight (and hopefully will, if I have said anything incorrect)

chrisjh777

OK,

I should make it clear that I don't have a problem with modelling (creating, amending parts and assemblies), albeit with a slow ADSL internet connection. (typically <2MB/sec download speed).

My problem is the creating and dimensioning drawings (prints) from the models.  The drawing side of OS has deteriorated and today is totally unusable.  I can't even open a drawing I created a couple of days ago.  I persisted with this drawing in order to share it with a customer.  The addition of notes to the drawing was painfully slow, with keystrokes often taking more than 30 seconds to appear on the screen.

I have Australian National Broadband Network (NBN) fibre optical cable  being installed and commissioned in the next couple of weeks.  Hopefully up to 25MB/sec will improve things (fingers crossed!!)

pete_yodis

@chrisjh777Have you tried using the submit Feedback button in Onshape when you run into issues?  It's a great system for that.

chrisjh777

OK Pete,

Thanks, I have submitted a ticket.  In the meantime, try to open my drawing tab associated with this project:

https://cad.onshape.com/documents/feb4be78adc44d789dc3bbb8/w/a2169f34b7184209943df841/e/e170e22019714b7f9d5d834b

The part studio and assembly tabs open fine, but the drawing tab will not.

daniel_chow

The drawing opened for me just fine. 

Weird. 

I'll assume you tried all the obvious things like a different browser, different computer, clear cache / history, reboot. 

cadmando

I am also having major problems using Drawings, all the above mentioned problems including parts of the drawing views disappearing from the drawing. The most annoying problem is the time delay to perform even the simplest task. At the moment drawing in Onshape are a no go area for me, they are going to have to make great improvements to make Drawing work.

Graham  

stephen_matte

Wow - I am having the same poor drawing performance issues documented above over a year ago!  As soon as I select a dimensioning tool my cursor starts the jitterbug.  Very poor performance.  I was hoping to recommend this to my company but obviously there are both performance and support problems.