Does using derived parts offer a speed advantage?

øyvind_kaurstad

When a part in a part studio gets a lot of features, working with it seems to become slower and slower as the number of features increases.

If more parts are to be added (and function together with this complex part), will there be a speed advantage to deriving the part to a new part studio and then continue modelling additional parts there?

ilya_baran

It depends on where the slowdown is coming from.  For most cases of deriving from a complex part studio, I believe there will be a speed advantage.  However if the problem is graphical display performance (frames per second when rotating), there's no speed advantage to deriving.

We would, however, like to know what exactly gets slower for you, say when creating a feature: is it the time for a feature dialog to come up?  The time for a preview to show when you make a change in the feature dialog?  Time for the spinner to disappear after everything seems to have been done?  Graphics/selection?  Tab switching?  How many features are you working with?  What does Ctrl+D show?

Onshape speed is a function of many different interacting components (some under our control, some not, like your internet speed or graphics card).  The more detail a "slow performance" complaint has, the better chance we have at understanding and addressing what's going on.

øyvind_kaurstad

@ilya_baran Thanks for answering. I have never experienced any graphics slowdowns, it is always happening as a result of some editing, and it can be any of the things you mentioned, but it is seldom the time for a dialog to come up. Either it is the preview taking a looong time, or it is the spinner taking a long time to disappear after clicking OK. Usually it is a combination.

I've looked at the info in the Ctrl-D dialog during such a slowdown, and it reported normal ping times (around the 50 ms mark) the whole time. And graphics manipulation works (rotate model, for example) just fine while this is ongoing.

ilya_baran

Ok, that basically rules out client-side problems.  It could still be your internet connection (if the bandwidth is low) but more likely it's taking time on our end.  If you're able to reproduce a case when preview takes a looong time to appear, please share the model with support (via a feedback ticket) and we'll take a look.  Regarding the spinner, keep in mind that you can continue making changes even once it's spinning -- the spinner might reflect for example that assemblies that reference the part studio you're editing are still being updated.

øyvind_kaurstad

My internet connection is a 50 Mbit/s fiber, and it is dead reliable (very seldom any issues at all), so I really doubt this is in my end. However, this is random and usually not reproducible in any realiable manner (which is why sharing with support isn't very helpful), and as others have mentioned, certain times of day will be worse. It really does look like some server-side capacity issues.

Thankfully, Onshape is useable most of the time, it's not like this is happening all the time. Just a little too often.

ilya_baran

Ok, I see.  I would be surprised if it is actual capacity issues since we over-provision quite a bit.  One possibility is that a previous operation "completes" quickly like undo of a feature edit early in the feature list but the next operation triggers a full part studio regen (and one of our features regenerates slowly).  We also had a bug before the last deployment that would occasionally trigger a full regen for no good reason -- that should no longer be happening.  This is likely compounded by one of the features regenerating more slowly than it should -- we're working on better ways of measuring that.