Speed, this tool has not

scott_lurton

What the heck is going on? Was this tool only designed for very small parts and assemblies. Anytime I get beyond a certain number of mate connectors the tool completely falls apart and is unresponsive. I'm on a new IMac with 32 gig of memory running the recommended setup in Google Chrome but still the tool is painfully slow. 
Onshape, figure out the speed thing before you figure out the whole team / internet model development. If your tool is slow then no one is going to use it and the whole team model development is not going to make a difference.
You have a serious problem here that you should have fixed before you left beta. 
Please don't respond to this with a bunch of advice on how to make it faster, If I provide processing speed, video speed and memory (which I have) I should not have to fight with a tool in order have good performance. 

ellen_timiney

"Please don't respond to this with a bunch of advice on how to make it faster"

Then I'll just leave you to suffer......

øyvind_kaurstad

I have also experienced severe slowdowns with Onshape, mostly when the number of features starts to increase. It does become annoying, and sometimes it hangs for a really long time, and I can't see how that is acceptable for professional users. I believe the main issue is twofold: One is the speed of communication with the Onshape servers (not just bandwidth, but also latency) from your machine, the other is just how much computing power their servers have. If you had your own copy of their server on your local LAN, then everything would be just as quick as if you were running a desktop application on your machine (or even quicker, if the server was more powerful than your computer).

Onshape has to ensure that their total computing power is adequate for the number of users they have, but they also need to have their servers placed close to high-capacity internet hubs, and they have to distribute their servers around the world (and I believe this is indeed what they do).

Doing such a computational power intensive application in the cloud is no easy task, and I for one am impressed with what they have achieved, while still recognizing that for professional users the sometimes long delays and slowdowns needs to be adressed.

I think there is one really useful metric that Onshape could add to their application, and that is some form of quality indicator for the communtication between the user's machine and their server. When modelling, the browser constantly communicates with their server, and it shouldn't be too difficult to add some metric to show the quality of the communication. That way, the user can at least know if the slowdowns are because of communication issues or if it is a server load issue.

florian

@scott_lurton, what exactly is slow? I added my experience in italics

• Graphics speed? Drawing etc.? => No problem
• Feature creation? => Mostly usable, sometimes sloooow
• Feature deletion? => Often very slow for me
• Versioning, Branching, Merging, History etc. => Works fine
• Opening and closing documents? => Sometimes OK, sometimes very slow

I share your concerns. Let's find out what it is…

3dcad

I have found time of day making the biggest difference, luckily I'm 8 hours ahead of US and during my workday everything works fast.

I have decent work pc with 64gigs memory which I have found speeding up things only when having a lot of parts, usually cheap chromebook performs just fine even with semi-complicated stuff.

In (workday) evenings I'm too suffering severe speed problems, on weekends things are a bit better.

I think it's not about the amount of parts/bodies that makes simple things slower, I'm having big slowdowns also with (blueprint) project which only has like 10 sketches without any bodies - there is a lot of changes so history is big (514mb) and sketches are rather complicated (for mcad) since they are actually blueprints. 

michał_1

@3dcad  for same reasons (time of day) I suspect that simply servers are overloaded. I even found that slowdowns don't depend on how complex tasks are. It looks random. It's more like, if I had to wait for my turn.

øyvind_kaurstad

Well, at the moment Onshape is more or less unuseable for me here in Europe. It would have been *really* handy to have some indicator as to what is causing this. Are you listening, Onshape?

ellen_timiney

Here in Europe for me it is very useable....

øyvind_kaurstad

It resolved itself shortly after I wrote the message. But the point about some better status info stands. We need some indicator during the modelling session to let us know the status of what is currently going on.

tom_scarince

Call it "link quality" and display a percentage of packets that made it through vs total sent.  Or ping time.  Or "frames per second".  Downside is people might start to obsess about it. 

matthew_menard

Did you try Crtl+D? 



This at least gives you ping and rough FPS info.  I agree that a more robust solution would be nice.  Also, the Ctrl+D shortcut tries to bookmark the page in Firefox, so customizeable controls would also be nice.

øyvind_kaurstad

The Ctrl+D trick was unknown to me, so thanks for that. However, it still doesn't provide any info about server load, which might be the main reason why slowdowns happen. But I'll be sure to at least open that dialogue the next time I have a severe slowdown (if it can indeed be opened under that circumstance) to see if the ping time is less than ideal. I currently have around 50 ms, which is not too shabby.

The bookmark annoyance is true also in Chromw, BTW. But that's probably not something Onshape can fix. They could however give us a buttone for it, so that it can be opened by a mouse click.

3dcad

I guess the best we can do is file a ticket (feedback link in ?-menu) and tell Onshape everytime we feel something's wrong, this way they can see server loads/status on that particular time and try to resolve these speed issues.

For those who think that Onshape runs in their own server and think that they should buy more bandwidth and processors to make it faster - checkout https://www.onshape.com/partners/platform

adam_mercier

I had speed issues too last week when load testing heavy assemblies, very annoying.
Issue was both in sketching, functions previews, workspace switching...
I can understand some speed issues when loading the main assembly tab

peter_hall

Without doubt my main speed issues have been with drawings, it took me hours to dimension up four drawings, nearly as long as 3D modeling it. This is frustrating.

GWS50

I too have the above issues and I have noticed that the slowness or lagging is worse at different times of the day.

gideonwaldner

I am using a chrome book and i do not experienced slowness or lagging 

coleman

I am going to say that speed and performance is improving.  I have experienced lagging and sluggish movement in assemblies in the past.  

However, this is a 378 component assembly and there is virtually no lag or delay when moving the components with mates or rolling and tumbling the model.  

adam_mercier

That is annoying as hell, happened lately when importing models from traceparts, lasts 5 minuets when I cant work at all on any tab...

lana

We are aware of sporadic slowdowns in Europe and Asia regions. There are several issues at play - we are working to address the issues we understand and to improve performance data collection in a future.

john_rousseau

We are definitely listening. We do care about performance issues! Making sure that everyone around the globe has good performance on a wide variety of devices is a little challenging and complicated. However, it's our job to make sure that as many Onshape users as possible find using our service a delight. 

Here is some information:
- We have deployed compute resources to 4 regions around the globe (US, EU, SE Asia and AU).
- The further your client is away from one of these regions, the higher your "latency" (the round trip time to our service). High latency can make your experience "laggy".
- The quality of the internet connection (both latency and bandwidth) between your client and our servers dictates how fast we can get information to your client. Large amounts of data (large assemblies for instance) take time to transmit and this can extend document open times, tab switching and other operations.
- Certain parts of the service have some known performance problems at higher latencies that we are aggressively working on fixing.
- Our servers are not overloaded - We add capacity dynamically (in minutes) to handle the load anywhere around the globe.
- It's possible that local internet congestion at certain times of the day causes performance problems in some parts of the world.
- The internet is a wild place - Performance problems that would not show up Googling for "best cat toothpaste" can show up when you are doing 3D modeling. 
- The stats that you measured yesterday's CAD workstation with (memory, CPU speed, etc.) are not the best predictors of Onshape performance. Internet performance, WebGL performance and browser performance are more important numbers.
- Web browser extensions, specific graphics card chipsets and other factors can have a big impact on how Onshape performs.
- The vast majority of our users have a fast, smooth experience using Onshape, but I know this is little consolation for those of you that don't.
- There are performance problems for some users that we don't completely understand yet. We work on these every day.

Here is what we are doing:
- Listening
- Constantly measuring a whole array of performance metrics (client, network and server)
- Fixing bugs as we find them
- Improving the product to handle the current and future requirements of our rapidly growing user base
- Improving our ability to detect, diagnose and remedy performance problems
- Improving the product to degrade more gracefully when internet performance degrades

Here is what you can do:
- Give us detailed, specific feedback. Saying "Onshape is slow" doesn't help us make it better.
- You don't need to report every instance of slowness, but saying "Starting at 13:17 AEST modeling operations (like saving 'Extrude 17') on the current document started taking twice as long as they had been. This lasted 20 minutes and have now returned to normal." is much more helpful.
- Please use the Feedback tool in the product to report these performance problems. 
- Generally we need to know if there is anything that you did that makes the problem worse or better. Does a rollback help? Does exiting the document or reloading your browser tab help? Saying "Dragging assemblies in Onshape always gets slower in Munich around 02:30 every weekday" is also helpful.
- If Onshape is always slow for you, try running Onshape on the new computers at your local electronics store. This will help you determine if your client is slow or if the area you live in is far from our data centers.

We're definitely not done building Onshape. Just as we continually add new features, we continually try to improve the quality and accessibility of the service. We're going to make mistakes sometimes and we're not always going to be able to move as fast we want, but we are trying to make it better every day. I apologize to to those of you that are frustrated.

Please keep the feedback coming.

dennis_20

@john_rousseau Thank you for such clear and detailed information!!     (Beautiful communication that I wish we would get more consistently from OS.)

With regard to large assemblies, is there a possibility to do something akin to SolidWorks' "lightweight" mode; perhaps automatically fully loading those parts that get involved and leaving the others lightweight?  Just a thought.

john_rousseau

Thanks Dennis. We are definitely working on reducing the size of the data that we need to send to the client. Please stay tuned.

scott_lurton

Thanks for the feedback. When I wrote the original post I was very frustrated. I have actually changed my approach to creating my model. I have switched from many instances of a part using mate connectors to glue them together, to the use of many sketches within a single part and only creating a new part when I need to model a part of another color. This has improved the performance and I have not had the issue that I previously had. I'm having another problem which I believe is caused by too many sketches in a single part. I'll post separately but it won't recognize surfaces on specific parts of the model.

To be as specific as I can for John, when my assembly reaches so many mate connectors it seems to slow to a dead crawl. It seems to happen when the number of mate connectors is above 25.  It's as if there is a memory leak, but this can't happen since there is no thick client.

john_rousseau

Hi Scott. Thanks for the feedback! The client still could have a memory leak (we run a fair amount of javascript in the browser). In addition, we could have a server-side memory leak. Can you please open a support ticket and share your document with us so we can see what you are seeing?

When you say "it seems to slow to a dead crawl", what do you mean? Is it slow creating mate connectors? Creating mates? Inserting parts? Assembly drag? The more detail you can give us, the faster we can solve the problem.

3dcad

Very good @john_rousseau , very good

When I'm having performance problems, it's usually when opening model - it just keeps spinning and all I can do is manipulate the view but tools won't respond. It will go away at some point but sometimes I get timeout before I can work.

Sometimes it's enough to refresh, sometimes shift+refresh and sometimes nothing helps. After few hours everything usually works normally.
I've tried to send ticket immediately when bumping into severe performance problems so that you can see timestamp from my ticket. 

LKRENZLER

The last few days the speed of response from the Onshape server has been quite erratic.  Sometimes OK, other times terrible.  It is not our internet connection, we have gigabit fibre which is not heavily used.  The second issue is viewport performance which is very poor.  Other packages offer orders of magnitude better performance in this area.  If Onshape wants to be a serious contender in professional CAD performance really needs to be addressed.  It's like wading through mud sometimes. 

fnxf

LKRENZLER said:

The last few days the speed of response from the Onshape server has been quite erratic.  Sometimes OK, other times terrible.  It is not our internet connection, we have gigabit fibre which is not heavily used.  The second issue is viewport performance which is very poor.  Other packages offer orders of magnitude better performance in this area.  If Onshape wants to be a serious contender in professional CAD performance really needs to be addressed.  It's like wading through mud sometimes. 

Do you share the same account between multiple users at the same time? Maybe this contributes to poor performance. Also, if you open a ticket on the corresponding document I've found Onshape support to always be extremely helpful.

john_rousseau

Hi @LKRENZLER. I took a look at your performance metrics over the past 7 days and you certainly are right, your bandwidth has been quite erratic. It's consistently good on one day and consistently bad on the next. I don't see this pattern in the traffic coming from our servers in general. Your latency is good and what I would expect from your location.

If this persists, please make sure that someone locally is not consuming all of your internet bandwidth and then contact your ISP. Tell them that you are seeing traffic problems from your location to the AWS data center in Oregon, US. If they need a specific endpoint to test against, have them use dynamodb.us-west-2.amazonaws.com. That's not ours, but it runs out of the same data center.

LKRENZLER

OK, we'll have to contact our ISP as we can't find any issues internally.  As of 3 days ago we are all working from home now and issues still persist (on a variety of ISP's).  Maybe it's our whole city, I don't know.  Generally, documents are not shared with multiple users.  Today I had one colleague take over 15 minutes (not seconds, minutes) to open a drawing template.

tim_hess427

@LKRENZLER - Just a shot in the dark, but since you mentioned issues with several users in different locations, are you by chance using a VPN to connect to a company network? 

I'm not a networking expert, but just thinking it could be a common denominator for several users in different locations with different providers.