Let's solve the speed issue

black_kydex

Lately, I've been having a great deal of trouble doing anything in OnShape. For all the great features the program has, it seems to be very vulnerable to long load times, which cripples my ability to work on a project. I have verified that this is only an issue with OnShape, rather than my computer. It's nothing special, but I can game, watch YT, stream videos, and use other CAD programs. As everyone knows, the server(s) for OnShape are routinely bogged down by user volume, which in turn renders the program nearly useless. As a free user myself, I know that I'm part of the problem. The solution I'm proposing (and hoping OnShape will see and consider) is that there be some kind of option to contribute monthly to a fund that exists solely for the purpose of upgrading the server speed. Call it a mid-level account. In any case, it couldn't possibly require that much money to drastically improve the speed, and therefore the user experience across the board. $10/month from several hundred users would do it. If we're being honest, I suspect there would be overwhelming support from the community for this type of plan. I appreciate the program, and I would love to see it continue to grow. The regular updates and additions the team comes up with are superb! But if we can't even use the program for the simplest of functions, it's not worth the time and frustration that many of us are experiencing, seemingly without end some days.

NeilCooke

I suspect there is something going on between our servers and your setup. The servers are the fastest AWS have and we automatically add more servers as demand requires, so throwing $10/user at it will not improve the speed. Could you share a URL of a doc you are having problems with?

john_rousseau

Hi @black_kydex. So I usually stay out of this stuff, but "As everyone knows, the server(s) for OnShape are routinely bogged down by user volume," is just not true. The job of my team is to make sure that the Onshape (little "s") servers do not get bogged down and we have years of developed automation to do exactly that. @NeilCooke is 100% correct. Your information from "everyone" is not.

Onshape definitely has performance issues in areas, but our engineering teams have worked for years to continually improve performance while we add more and more demanding features.

black_kydex

@NeilCooke and @john_rousseau thank you both for the reply. I guess I was mistaken about the root cause of the issue and potential solution. I'm certainly not here to insult the team. A unique link will most likely shed no light, as this is happening across all of my documents. Perhaps your server and mine are simply not playing nice together at times. That would make sense, given the slow speeds I experience concurrent with completely normal speeds through other large bandwidth services. 

NeilCooke

No offence taken. It certainly isn't right that you should be experiencing slow speeds at all. I guess it also depends on what you consider as "slow". If you open the performance tab on the left of an open doc it will show your latency to the server, and double-check that https://cad.onshape.com/check is all good.

black_kydex

@NeilCooke I'll do that. To be clear, I'm a very grateful free user and would bite my tongue if the issue wasn't totally crippling my ability to use the program. The "slow" I'm experiencing (and only very recently) is not just me being particularly critical. For example, I'll load a document, create a new sketch, and upon simply plotting one point or drawing one line, the pinwheel of death appears on screen and I am unable to do anything to it for upwards of 30 minutes, at which point I can draw one more line and wait another half hour and so on. If it were only on large files with complex models, I'd chalk it up to the obviously larger data stream, but this happened earlier today on my initial sketch in a new document. After a shallow dive into some forums, I read a number of other users' accounts of similar experiences, which led me to my hasty conclusion that it must be slow servers. 

john_rousseau

@black_kydex I see that you are using an integrated Intel HD GPU. That's a very low-performing option. Most of the heavy lifting is on the server side, but there still is some substantial GPU usage to support WebGL on the client side. Do you have a discrete GPU available in that machine? We have documentation for convincing your browser to use it.

black_kydex

@john_rousseau I'll check. My computer certainly isn't anything special, but I'm able to play large games online and off with it. Occasionally it's lag a bit while loading, but it's not terrible by any means. 

benjamin_mcrae

I'm having a similiar issue with one of the devices I use with onshape. Anytime I try and import parts into an assembly or try and export or go through the menus onshape takes for ever. An Example is I'm Currently attempting to export a stl part and ive been timing it it took 5 minutues to open the dialogue to export the part. This is on my higher performance device with 32gb of ram and a 2060 with a i7 9700. whereas on my other machine with a i3 7100u and no dedicated the time to do such tasks is practically zero. I have tried many things even reseting windows to no help. I really enjoy onshape but i would perfer to use it on a machine that doesn't lag when rendering large assemblies

atum

I'm having an issue in a simple part that consists of a single feature that has been repeated 'many' times in a linear array.  My "sprinkle stencil" consists of thin sheet with a ~15 x 15 array of identical shapes cut through it.  
It renders fine and quickly once loaded with POV changes, but pinwheels a long time between any operation that modifies the model or loads a new sketch etc.
https://cad.onshape.com/documents/6453b829739adfe89a7dfe8e/w/0ef18c7597307863365d94c4/e/49af81ffbbe671a9fbf7d1dc

dustin_144

https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/comment/85099#Comment_85099

Hi ,

Maybe you may enlighten me on why my document is sitting here loading and not opening while I am able to shop for an offline fusion 360 license on google. ( 35 days left in my pro discovery license with ON "little S"hape)

john_rousseau

Hi @dustin_144. Thanks for reaching out.

I can definitely see the one of the events you are talking about in our logs (18:54 UTC). Our servers are reporting that the client stopped responding and so we closed the connection. You are right: A stable internet connection is required for Onshape to work. Looking at the logs on our servers, I'm not seeing any other issues at that time.

I'm happy to see you have been using us since 2018. Part of the benefits of the pro discovery program is that you have access to our world-class support team. Open a support ticket and we can dig in a bit more to see if there are any patterns around what you ran into. It also gives you the ability to try Onshape for free to see if it works for your use case. If you find out that it doesn't suit your needs, there are definitely other CAD choices in the market.