What is Onshape's "Resource Limit"?

tony_459

I made a trivial change to a part today and hoped to add the new parts to an existing assembly only to find it's... so slow... as to be downright impossible to do.

I keep waiting and waiting and waiting for Onshape to recognize the various features I need to select as mate connectors... and after many minutes of waiting and finally getting a chance to select those features, Onshape just... ignores my clicks... so that I can not ever actually add a mate to my very slightly modified parts...

This has happened before, usually when a model grows large, and I'm told I'm hitting Onshape's magical resource limit.

So OK, there's only so large Onshape will ever allow your models to be. Well then: What is that resource limit, so that we know if we might hit it before starting a model? No one works for months only to discover they can't ever finish because ta-da, they've hit some magical limit.

tony_459

There must be some way to quantify this resource limit and to share it so that we can all plan intelligently and avoid wasting our time. Plus, it would be nice not to discover the software is suddenly the sole factor determining what you will and will not capture in your model.

Alex_Kempen

The problem with quantifying the resource limit is it depends on a variety of factors, including Onshape user load, AWS server availability, the quality of your machine, the quality of your internet connection, and so on. Ultimately, it is not always possible to get great performance, but there are certainly a variety of methods which can be applied to improve performance and reduce regen times. For example, there is a good Onshape help article on improving performance here - some good advice includes avoiding derive chains across part studios, and pulling subassemblies from a document version rather than from main. You can also use the recently released performance panel to help diagnose areas which are having an excessively negative impact on performance.

tony_459

Thanks, Alex. I'm aware of those things, and I've gone the length of buying a powerful laptop with a proper GPU just for modeling.

...None of that helps as you get close to that resource limit, though, as Onshape becomes super slow and, eventually, starts to error out, in effect forbidding you from continuing your model (if it already wasn't painfully slow when the hard errors start).

So the resource limit is a big thing and it should be published, so that if we have large models we can go another route instead of investing time that in the end has no chance of amounting to something.This isn't just about improving performance: Onshape literally makes it impossible to continue once you hit that resource limit, no matter how good your computer is, and no matter how good your modeling practices are.

Onshape models cannot exceed a certain size/complexity, and so it seems fair that we know what that size/complexity/whatever is ahead of time..

john_rousseau

Hi @tony_459. Please open a support ticket. We can very often find ways to make things faster for you.

All software has limits. You may have hit one or you may have hit a bug. There may be some suggestions we can provide that will make your design perform better.

Thanks
-John