Too slow to load in New Zealand

andrew_gow

Hi,
I've been experimenting with Onshape here in NZ, where we have archaic internet connection overseas (e.g. often sub 10 mbit despite "50 mbit/s" local connection).  I find Onshape just too slow to load things.  For example, the Tutorial 3 - Arbor press just took 3m02s to load the Arbor press assembly.  The arbour press part took a further 1m30s. Tutorial 4 showed the part in only 25 seconds, but to be in the drawing display took a further 1m32s.  This is just too long and makes Onshape not a realistic proposition here. (I'm in Wellington - it may work faster in Auckland).  Load an assembly again and it seems to take just as long.  Mechies are paid high hourly rates and need to get on with stuff!  But we are looking for much better value, higher performance alternatives to Solidworks (bloatworks!) so keep doing what you're doing!
Acceptable in my mind would be for a simple part to load in less than 15s and a complex part in less than a minute, i.e. not too much slower than Solidworks.
And if it's going to take so long, the 'loading studio data' indicator needs to give a progress report so you can tell if the download has stalled - once you're 3 minutes in you really don't trust that it's loading properly.
Perhaps a local server (or hosting on a local cloud service) would help.  Not sure, but I reckon you guys will have a better idea than I do.

song_jaybi

I live in Korea. Today loading graphics is so slow too

traveler_hauptman

Hi neighbor, I'm also in Welly. Also getting long load times, though not quite as long as you when I timed the same model.

I've been away from Onshape for a while. I remember it loading faster in the past but my memory is not that great....

Huh... I was testing the load times and getting times of 1 minute for my own models pretty consistently, with the data rate consistently stuck at 1kb/sec, but then after doing 5 or 6 tries it jumped up to 2.5Kb/sec and load times dropped below 10sec... Which is closer to what I remember in the past.

philip_thomas

@andrew_gow

First, thank you so much for taking a look at Onshape. We are working night and day to make Onshape the best professional grade CAD system on the planet that just so happens to be 'full-cloud' and free

We are very sensitive to performance issues and wanted to take a moment to make sure you were getting the best performance possible.
10Mbps is ample for a very good Onshape experience.
We are not 'streaming' anything (building a model in Onshape is a series of small transactions with our servers).

After talking to our ops guys, i just deleted several additional paragraphs of technical explanations and will summarize with;
1) We have opened several additional data centers (Singapore now serves AU/NZ)
2) Make sure your DNS service is correctly reporting your location so that the closest server is assigned to you (it's rare, but has happened)
3) Making a copy of the tutorial document (and opening that one) will be significantly faster (we are fixing this).
4) Documents that you create (or are shared into) will similarly be faster
5) Anytime you feel that performance is sub-par, open a support ticket.
6) We will never stop working to make your experience better

Please continue using Onshape and feel free to ask any questions.

Thank you.

john_rousseau

Just a quick correction on Phillip's great post. AU and NZ are served out of Sydney. 

philip_thomas

john_rousseau said:

Just a quick correction on Phillip's great post. AU and NZ are served out of Sydney. 

Ah - a slip of the mind - thank you JR.

Michel_Storms

The current speed of Onshape is a joke. I am a CAD/CAM engineer who switched jobs recently, and have been looking into finding the perfect software for the new company. Onshape looked nice, and I liked it for personal use when it was in BETA, but I was never very happy with the speed of panning, zooming, ... it makes my shiny Core i7 MacBook Pro with 16gb of RAM and an SSD feel like a cheap netbook.

Thinking it would have matured by now, I logged in last week while a colleague was watching, and felt ashamed for even coming up with this idea of visiting the Onshape site. Really Onshape, is this what a new product running on the wonderful engine of SolidWorks should look like???

Now don't come saying I need another browser, to flush my cache, to get a faster computer, whatever... been there and done that. The ONLY and I really mean the ONLY fluid experience with Onshape I've had so far is on an iPhone or iPad. I will shut about the fact that I've been asking, begging for MORE THAN SIX MONTHS to ask for a landscape mode for the iPhone version, so I could use it in a decent way and with Airplay mirroring on my iPhone 6 Plus.
What this tells us is that the ONLY way for Onshape to succeed is a NATIVE APP (which I have been saying for more than six moths as well) for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Yes, those THREE platforms, as you've attracted a lot of Mac and Linux users who wanted something that feels like SolidWorks... and don't want to lose them because your current percentage of users who are HAPPY and PAYING and NOT LOOKING FOR ALTERNATIVES AS WE SPEAK is VERY LOW. You know it ,I know it, most users on this forum know it, and your investors know it too.

Please don't let this nice new platform die, and follow the example set by Autodesk (Fusion 360 is native+cloud and a winner)... : Please Make A Native App

Regards,

Michel Storms (@stormychel)

traveler_hauptman

Linking @stormychel's earlier post (and subsequent discussion) to save rehashing things too much. To continue that discussion (Onshape is cloud only and non-cloud alternatives aren't as good for some reason) I suggest we add to that post or start a new one.

don_howe

While I am not in NZ, but NE Ohio, I too have been experiencing a lag much more than I normally do when working on my PC and I don't think it's my internet. For example selecting lines and points in a sketch is almost instantaneous but making the same line and point coincident takes about 5 seconds and I can see the little loading icon spinning. In fact anything of a command nature seems to have the same amount of delay. For example turning features on and off in the feature manager tree is inexplicably slow. I did a speed test of my internet connection and it is working as it should be. 

with speedtest.net
12ms ping
3.54mps upload
1.19mps download

with xfinity speed test
35ms ping
3.54mps upload
1.13mps download

john_rousseau

Hi Don. I don't believe the problems you are describing are related to your connection (I looked at some internal metrics for your connection to us). My guess is that it's more a performance problem related to the operations you are doing. We are actively working on improving the performance of our service. We hope to roll out some of these improvements in the near future. 

Please open a support ticket describing the problems you are seeing and share your model with support. We will take a look and see what we can do to make things better. Sorry for the hassle and thanks for constructive feedback!

derek_ward

don_howe said:

While I am not in NZ, but NE Ohio, I too have been experiencing a lag much more than I normally do when working on my PC and I don't think it's my internet. For example selecting lines and points in a sketch is almost instantaneous but making the same line and point coincident takes about 5 seconds and I can see the little loading icon spinning. 

@don_howe, I must echo what you are experiencing. I, too, have been having these issues. Not only with performing various operations, but with the initial loading of documents and switching to and from various part studios/assemblies. I know, for sure, that it's not my internet connection (133Mbps down, 5.5Mbps up and 8ms ping with Speedtest). It has gotten worse since I first started using OS a few months ago and I really am hoping for some more performance improvements. 

_Ðave_

I also feel that Onshape's performance as decreased recently but because on my slow internet speeds (slightly slower than Don's) I felt that the issue was on my end. 

brucebartlett

My performance here in Australia has also seemed to have dropped off and not related to the internet speed as this is now the first thing I check, clearing cache also doesn't seem to do anything.  Sometime it's to the level where commands will not work a after clicking on them serval time's, also slow load time and slow rebuilds after rolling back in the tree. 

At one point this happen during a collaboration secession with another user in Aus and we were both see the same performance. 

I do try to log feed back as much as posible, but sometime I just have to get my work done and feedback is quite slow, and then you also have the follow up interruptions.  

I feel the perform dropped after the improvement to reduce tessellation.

I hopefully perform will improve again and very happy to see @john_rousseau 's comment above. 

tesmond992

We also have wound up with quite complex models now as my Mech Drafter has gotten used to Onshape (and now moans a lot about the possibility of having to move back to a desktop application - as he loves Onshape when its working), but I recently bought him a new workstation (which is something I thought Onshape was meant to really avoid) the PC is has a new Core i7, 12GB of DDR4 RAM, SSD, 2x Quadro Video cards and it didnt really improve anything very much at all over the 5 year old laptop he had been using.

Even a non technical person can tell Onshapes idea is fantastic, I have two people invested in it succeeding but if things dont improve (especially the issues when Onshape does a magical upgrade which break the models and drawings) soon its going to be a hard conversation with two engineers and a couple expensive licences for Solidworks soon - cant have them spending hours unproductively trying to work through Onshape.

I can certainly see the biggest problem is the amount of RAM that gets chewed up which Chrome I think has real trouble with keeping stable.

Cheers
Tim

john_rousseau

Tim, please open a support ticket and let us know the details of what you are seeing (broken models, chrome memory leak and poor performance). We have lots of metrics about what our users are doing, but we don't know everything. Please don't assume that we know about the problems you are seeing if you don't report them.

I'll look into your network connection performance as soon as you open that ticket. We will also get one of our engineers looking at the chrome memory leak. We've done a lot of work to squash those, but your use case may be triggering one we haven't seen.

I'm very concerned about the broken models on upgrade. I won't say that it has never happened, but we basically do an automated test upgrade of every single model before we do it for real in production, so it should be exceedingly rare.

We want Onshape to be as awesome as you and your "two people" do. Help us with some good feedback and we'll get there. Sorry that it hasn't been awesome out-of-the-box for you.

3D

No doubt you have to manage priorities.... 

but making a significant improvement in "Load performance" needs to be given high priority as it is getting more & more frustrating waiting for features to load.... a few suggestions as follows:

1: Firstly have it has an option for users to opt into (on preferences)
2: Load Doc name first: 
3: Have option to select tab to open: this opens doc & interface elements while you
4: Then select roll back bar position otherwise have the ability to postpone features expected to be problematic from loading.

Not sure how feasible this is but potentially a way to improve appearance of performance improvement...?

Appreciate your feedback...

3D

I posted personal feedback a year ago regarding this .... there have been numerous great improvemnt since which may well affect how this is achieved... nevertheless... be great to have some form of feedback on progress in this regard from the OS TEAM!

john_rousseau

Hi 3D. We spend a lot of our engineering resources on making Onshape fast. Opening documents and switching tabs is a high priority. For the vast majority of users around the globe, Onshape is very speedy. However, there still are a lot of areas that we can improve, especially in the areas of collaboration and working with very large documents.

Please open a support ticket so we can look at your document, your graphics hardware and your internet connection. There are things we can do to help in specific cases including suggestions on document structure. We also can identify and fix bugs that can cause performance problems.