What can I do to speed up Onshape?

bill_daniels

I have a Dell T3400 Precision workstation running Ubuntu 14.04 with a 12MB/sec internet connection.  I've tried several browsers and made sure webGL was operating.

3dcad

What is your problem?

bill_daniels

I thought the title conveyed the question.

Onshape runs so slow on my system that I can't really do any serious work.  Why is that and what can I do about it?

_Ðave_

Onshape is still in beta, the team appears to be working hard in preparing for production especially with the drawings module.

3dcad

Do you have problems with opening example models? Sketching? Assembly? Drawigns? Or just in general?

I think it's best for you to send feedback to Onshape using the ?-mark menu in cad. Support can take a look at your particular case.

ilya_baran

Rami is right and asking support is the way to go.

That said, offering a guess without knowing anything more than what you described in your setup, perhaps you don't have NVIDIA drivers installed for your video card (or webgl is not using them) and are falling back to software rendering (excruciatingly slow).  If, say in Google Chrome, you look at the output of chrome://gpu you should see something about NVIDIA in the GL_VENDOR or GL_RENDERER fields of the Driver Information table.

All of that said, the T3400 is an 8 year old system I think and even properly configured may not provide the best performance.

andrew_troup

I have an older laptop set up for Solidworks 2009 (which will not run on a modern OS):
It runs nVidia driver 9.18.13.4084, and seems to run Onshape modeller pretty well, but drawings are very slow indeed
Here's the problems and workarounds reported after pasting chrome://gpu in as the browser URL:

Graphics Features disabled

• Multiple Raster Threads: Disabled
• Rasterization: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled 
  

Driver Bug Workarounds

• clear_uniforms_before_first_program_use
• disable_gl_path_rendering
  (NVIDIA drivers before 337 lack features in NV_path_rendering and related extensions to implement driver level path rendering)
  
• exit_on_context_lost
• scalarize_vec_and_mat_constructor_args
• texsubimage_faster_than_teximage
• use_current_program_after_successful_link

It would be good to know if any of these are likely to make it a losing proposition to run Onshape, and if so, which

bill_daniels

I'm sure the Onshape team is working hard.  The drawings module really seems to work well.  In fact, I will continue using Onshape just because of that module.  My only issue is with the Assembly and Part Studio modules.  I have to use local CAD to produce STEP shapes for import into Onshape so I can make drawings.

I have a public model called Volta 2D 300 you can look at.

bill_daniels

In an effort to help the Onshape team and discover shortcomings of my system, I ran this WebGL on-line test.
https://www.khronos.org/registry/webgl/sdk/tests/webgl-conformance-tests.html

WebGL Conformance Test Results

Version 1.0.4 (beta)

-------------------

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu Chromium/45.0.2454.101 Chrome/45.0.2454.101 Safari/537.36

WebGL VENDOR: WebKit

WebGL VERSION: WebGL 1.0 (OpenGL ES 2.0 Chromium)

WebGL RENDERER: WebKit WebGL

Unmasked VENDOR: NVIDIA Corporation

Unmasked RENDERER: Quadro FX 570/PCIe/SSE2

WebGL R/G/B/A/Depth/Stencil bits (default config): 8/8/8/8/24/0

-------------------

Test Summary (48995 total tests):

Tests ran in 766.00 seconds

Tests PASSED: 48946

Tests FAILED: 49

Tests TIMED OUT: 0

Tests SKIPPED: 0

-------------------

Failures:

conformance/buffers/buffer-data-and-buffer-sub-data.html: 8 tests failed

conformance/extensions/ext-sRGB.html: 8 tests failed

conformance/misc/expando-loss.html: 2 tests failed

conformance/textures/misc/cube-incomplete-fbo.html: 1 tests failed

deqp/data/gles2/shaders/functions.html: 8 tests failed

deqp/data/gles2/shaders/preprocessor.html: 18 tests failed

deqp/data/gles2/shaders/scoping.html: 4 tests failed

-------------------

pete_yodis

@bill_daniels What graphics card do you have in your T3400?  In my day job I have a T3400 (Windows 7 64 bit) outfitted with a quadro FX 570 card that is configured to run SolidWorks properly (ie doesn't have a newer driver).  I know it's probably not optimal, but it's decent enough for me to complete the cube test...

https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/comment/10822#Comment_10822


Another thought... upgrade the graphics card?

bill_daniels

It's a Nvidia Quadro FX570.

There are lots of newer Quadro cards on eBay and I'm wondering if it's worth buying one.  My T3400 has 8GB of memeroy and the T3400 can use 16GB so an upgrade there is a possibility but DDR2 memory is expensive.  The money might be better spent trading up to something like a T7500

pete_yodis

@bill_daniels If you are going to spend money... Walk in to Staples, Best Buy, Costco, Apple Store, Microsoft Store, etc.. and play around for a while on some devices at various price points.  See what you think.  And by play around, I mean log into your Onshape account and try things out.

bill_daniels

Pete, Best Buy was an excellent idea.  And, yup, Onshape was much faster on their machines than mine.

So, why is that?  Perhaps a workstation video card doesn't support WebGL the way a consumer video card does.  Or, maybe, it's just older workstations cards that have an issue with WebGL.  Maybe it's that all the BB machines were running Windows and I run Ubuntu Linux.

pete_yodis

bill_daniels said:

Pete, Best Buy was an excellent idea.  And, yup, Onshape was much faster on their machines than mine.

So, why is that?  Perhaps a workstation video card doesn't support WebGL the way a consumer video card does.  Or, maybe, it's just older workstations cards that have an issue with WebGL.  Maybe it's that all the BB machines were running Windows and I run Ubuntu Linux.

@bill_daniels I can't speak to the specifics with your exact setup as I haven't used that.  What I do know as a long time purchaser and user of workstation graphics cards is that they are really very poor on the computation side for the dollar amount that you pay.  The dollar amount you pay was largely because the market they are intended for is smaller, but is entirely captive (it's the same things as "business internet" vs "consumer internet").  Meaning... you pay a lot for those cards because you have to.  Their argument (graphics card companies) was that you paid a lot for all the driver specialization they worked on to get them to work well with MCAD products.  That was part of the reason, but was only a rather poor excuse to cover their ambition to really rake you over the coals for substandard hardware that was passed on.  I could explain a lot more on that end, but to make a long story short... the cards sitting in those machines at BB are probably an order of magnitude greater in their computation capability than your overpriced and outdated Quadro 570.  In fact at the time you purchased a Qaudro 570, the same amount of money would have purchased a far, far greater computation capable "gaming" (ie mass market) card.     One really cool thing about Onshape is that you get a much better bang for your buck on your local computation side - that's for a few reasons.  One of which is  the heavy lifting is mostly being done on AWS (CPU intense things), and another reason is the local hardware requirements haven't forced you into a high dollar captive market.  I can't speak much to WebGL and Linux, but I would bet you'd be fine if you wanted to stick with Linux and move to a newer card with better WebGL driver support.

If I were you, I'd contemplate purchasing all new hardware rather than patching up what is an older machine now.  But, I don't know your budget or your reasons for your setup and what you are doing with it.

michael_fuller

Change browsers.  I went from Chrome to Firefox on a whim and OnShape suddenly became usable.

billy2

If you want a really nice computer, head to the apple store and pick up a macbook  

billy2

Seriously though, since I run on a mac, I don't reboot for months at a time and I leave chrome open for the duration of that time. I'm finding that starting/stopping chrome every few weeks brings OS back to life.

Not sure why this is, any mac/linux users experiencing the same thing?