Onshape not recovering gracefully when something goes wrong

øyvind_kaurstad

I've been playing with a model where I'm sweeping a profile (actually more than one) along a conical helix, and I've run into a few roadblocks. More than once I've had Onshape just going into that meaningless spinning wait state without being able to tell me anything useful. Sometimes I get the popup on top telling me that my operation failed, and that I should contact support with a given support code. However, that is not possible, since the document still sits in the eternal spinning loop of death.

Then I tried to restore (from the documents menu) to a state prior to the one that caused the crash, but after a looong time spinning it comes back saying "Failed to restore. Service unavailable. Please try later.".

In this case I'm quite sure that the operation I was trying to do (a sweep remove) actually was perfectly valid, but I still got into this situation. When these things happen, it really detracts from my impression of Onshape. Giving meaningful feedback when things fail, and within a reasonable amount of time is just something I expect, even from a cloud service. What I call the "eternal spinning loop of death" is extremely annoying.

For me, the occasional slowness and lack of meaningful feedback on errors is the worst part of the Onshape experience. Since I'm a free user I realize that I might not be in a position to complain, but if I had been a paying customer I'd be even more dismayed.

michał_1

Sometimes I experience same behavior, what I do? I clear browser catch. I do that everytime I see some weird behavior, because it usually caused by browser itself.

øyvind_kaurstad

Well, I'm pretty sure that's not it in this case. I tried opening the document in a different browser (which I had not been used with Onshape), and the same happens. Actually, it seems that even making a copy of this document hangs, Onshape returned "An error occured attempting to copy this document". It still made a couple of copies of size "null".

What is more, the feature that caused the problem actually did finish successfully when I left it alone for a small eternity, so the feature itself is valid.

øyvind_kaurstad

Just for reference, I have submitted this specific document to Onshape support so that they can look at it, but this thread is more about general handling of situations like this. It really should be possible for Onshape to provide better indications to users when it sits there spinning.

michał_1

Today I almost can't work... this time I'm sure it's a problem at Onshape side... too many users???

john_rousseau

Michael, please open a support ticket with the document that you are working on and exactly what you are doing that's slow. Sorry for the hassle.