Some notes to help improve your Onshape experience

joe_sullivan

I use Onshape professionally (a lot of the documents I work with are in the 1-2GB range) and after using Onshape for awhile I compiled a small list of notes to help improve your Onshape experience:

• Your video card makes a big difference with rendering and interacting with your models. I used to have a NVIDIA GeForce GT 620 in my work station and using Onshape's compatibility check (https://cad.onshape.com/check) I would be able to measure 26.8 million triangles per second and 9.4 million lines per second. With that video card I would also experience significant lag when working with large models. I recently upgraded my video card to the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti and now using the compatibility check I am able to measure 349.3+ million triangles per second and 283.4+ million lines per second and experience almost no lag in large models.
• Use a 64-bit browser. 32-bit applications do not have the same access to your RAM as 64-bit applications. So you may have 16 GB of RAM on your computer but if you use a 32-bit application your browser will only have access to 2 GB of RAM. Firefox does not have a 64-bit stable release, but chrome does (I don't know about safari or opera). To check if you have a 64-bit version of Chrome go to settings -> about, if the version is followed by 64-bit you are good, if not you have the 32-bit distribution.
• Your internet speed will make a difference in model load times, how fast adding or modifying features respond, and how fast your models rebuild.

I hope that this is helpful to someone!

Tony_C_

Your second point; I wonder if that's why chorme seems to work bettter for me on my home computer?  FF seems to dog down but chrome is smooth.

joe_sullivan

@tony_castongia it could! When I switched from 32-bit chrome to 64-bit I noticed a pretty good improvement -- especially in drawings. 

Tony_C_

Inserting parts from other documents is fast too. They load about 150% faster.

3dcad

Wow, that 32 --> 64bit chrome made signifigant difference in handling large assemblies with laptop. Thanks @joe_sullivan !

RK

@joe_sullivan Thank you very much for sharing this valuable info.

brucebartlett

Hi Joe, great post. I see you mention internet speed which obviously can have a major impact. I don't normally check unless I have a problem but my feeling is that once my speed goes below about 8Mbps large assemblies and model rebuild starts to slow. I find you can still use Onshape down to about 4Mbps but you have to be patient. 

What are other people finding with internet speed? 

 

brian_jordan

As a relative newcomer to Onshape and 3D CAD I have to say that I'm pleased I hadn't seen this recommendation or I might not have started down this route. In this neck of the woods 8Mbps is an unimagined luxury; I regularly enjoy <4Mbps and still find Onshape renews faster than I can draw. For me the initial download of documents is a bit slow but thereafter, for now with relatively small documents, this speed seems adequate.

3dcad

I've been succesfully working with 3G but only with simple sketching / part modeling or so..

brucebartlett

brian_jordan said:

As a relative newcomer to Onshape and 3D CAD I have to say that I'm pleased I hadn't seen this recommendation or I might not have started down this route. In this neck of the woods 8Mbps is an unimagined luxury; I regularly enjoy <4Mbps and still find Onshape renews faster than I can draw. For me the initial download of documents is a bit slow but thereafter, for now with relatively small documents, this speed seems adequate.

Hi Brian,  It's great that you can use Onshape below 4Mbps, I am sure I have regularly used it with speed's below 4 as well. I remember while traveling I did a lot of work paired to a 3g network with only 2bar's of service which I think was down around 2Mbps, in this case just I just had to wait for models to load not get into big assemblies.

3dcad

I'm not very happy with load times in office though, I still need to wait for bigger model to load quite a while.