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Regeneration time is slow, but also not consistent - What gives?!
jonathanb_sydney
Member Posts: 29 PRO
I have a relatively complicated real product that is ready to go to market. I had designed most of the enclosure in a single part studio with over 200 features, but it was getting slow. I don't have any crazy patterned geometry or any particularly complex sketches.
I duplicated the part studio a handful of times for each major component, derived one or two key sketches that drive that particular component. I then fixed all the broken references and replaced the instances in the general assembly to refer to the new part studio and finally deleted all the features but the driving sketches in the original part studio. The original part studio now has the main frame of the enclosure … and very little else. This seemed like a good idea, even if the outcome was just better organisation.
Analysing the Regeneration Times, I noticed that corner breaks on sheet metal parts take nearly 2 seconds each to complete! With a single flange being the next highest at nearly a second. Not sure if today's Amazon outage has anything to do with this performance but this is super slow. The total regen time varies between 20-30 seconds.
If I suppress the Corner break features, curiously the remaining features do not stay ordered the same, and they get slower so that features such as holes that previously were ~600ms now take over a second! The total regen time barely changed!
What is the situation? Why is regeneration time not consistent? I feel that Onshape might be having good days and bad days (or at least hours…)
Any explanation? Or suggestions?
FYI, I'm running on a 4070 NVIDIA graphics, although only connected to the internet via Wi-Fi (in case its a network issue, but ping is great at <20ms)
Answers
Sheet metal can have some regen quirks. I think it's because of how the sheet metal is always calculating the flat pattern etc, so everything impacts everything else a bit.
I've seen regeneration times change for downstream features when the sheet metal itself gets more complex upstream. For example making a hole in a flange might take longer if I added a hole pattern first somewhere totally unrelated. I don't understand why suppressing an upstream feature would make downstream ones longer though. I'd expect the opposite.
One workflow that can help if you're able to do it, is to model using standard tools then convert it to sheet metal later with all of the holes already there (not great for hole callouts in drawings though).
One thing to make sure no matter what is that your derive feature is referencing a version, not the active workspace. It'll use some caching so the derive isn't having to rebuild the full part studio in each case.
The Onsherpa | Reach peak Onshape productivity
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I've definitely noticed some weird issues with corner breaks and their references. I would try to keep those to be one of the last features on a sheet metal model tree. Also corner breaks can behave differently if you select a vertex vs an edge. Sometimes a regular fillet (or chamfer) will be more stable or less likely to cause weirdness with sheetmetal.
Keep in mind that once you split up your part studios and use derive to drive child part studios, you can use versions for the derive features - even within the same document. This typically isn't what you want when you're deep in the middle of making a lot of fundamental changes, but once your models get more complex and you're refining things, switching to version references can help make your overall document performance better. If you need live workspace references later, you can always switch back.
Simon Gatrall | Product Development Specialist | Open For Work
The performance you are seeing is going to be related to your specific geometry vs. a service or AWS issue. Sheet metal can have some performance issues that we are aware of and are working on. Evan and Simon's suggestions are good ones.
Please open a support ticket so that we can investigate and give you additional, concrete things to improve the performance. In addition, there may be things we can improve in the application in the short term to improve your performance.