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Speed, this tool has not

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. 
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Comments

  • øyvind_kaurstadøyvind_kaurstad Member Posts: 234 ✭✭✭
    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.


  • florianflorian Member, OS Professional Posts: 110 ✭✭✭
    @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…
  • 3dcad3dcad Member, OS Professional, Mentor Posts: 2,470 PRO
    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. 
    //rami
  • michał_1michał_1 Member, Developers Posts: 214 ✭✭✭
    @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_kaurstadøyvind_kaurstad Member Posts: 234 ✭✭✭
    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_timineyellen_timiney Member Posts: 10
    Here in Europe for me it is very useable....

  • øyvind_kaurstadøyvind_kaurstad Member Posts: 234 ✭✭✭
    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_scarincetom_scarince Member, Developers Posts: 47 ✭✭✭

    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_menardmatthew_menard Member Posts: 96 ✭✭✭
    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_kaurstadøyvind_kaurstad Member Posts: 234 ✭✭✭
    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.
  • 3dcad3dcad Member, OS Professional, Mentor Posts: 2,470 PRO
    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
    //rami
  • adam_mercieradam_mercier OS Professional Posts: 33 ✭✭
    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_hallpeter_hall Member Posts: 196 ✭✭✭
    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.
  • GWS50GWS50 Member Posts: 366 PRO
    I too have the above issues and I have noticed that the slowness or lagging is worse at different times of the day.
  • gideonwaldnergideonwaldner Member Posts: 32 EDU
    I am using a chrome book and i do not experienced slowness or lagging 
    gideon waldner
  • colemancoleman OS Professional Posts: 244 ✭✭✭
    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_mercieradam_mercier OS Professional Posts: 33 ✭✭
    That is annoying as hell, happened lately when importing models from traceparts, lasts 5 minuets when I cant work at all on any tab...

    bug.png 64.4K
  • lanalana Onshape Employees Posts: 689
    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.
  • dennis_20dennis_20 Member Posts: 87 EDU
    @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_rousseaujohn_rousseau Member, Onshape Employees, Developers Posts: 353
    Thanks Dennis. We are definitely working on reducing the size of the data that we need to send to the client. Please stay tuned.
    John Rousseau / VP, Technical Operations / Onshape Inc.
  • scott_lurtonscott_lurton Member Posts: 7 PRO
    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_rousseaujohn_rousseau Member, Onshape Employees, Developers Posts: 353
    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.
    John Rousseau / VP, Technical Operations / Onshape Inc.
  • 3dcad3dcad Member, OS Professional, Mentor Posts: 2,470 PRO
    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. 

    //rami
  • LKRENZLERLKRENZLER Member Posts: 30 ✭✭
    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. 
  • fnxffnxf Member, User Group Leader Posts: 134 PRO
    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_rousseaujohn_rousseau Member, Onshape Employees, Developers Posts: 353
    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.
    John Rousseau / VP, Technical Operations / Onshape Inc.
  • LKRENZLERLKRENZLER Member Posts: 30 ✭✭
    edited November 2020
    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_hess427tim_hess427 Member Posts: 648 ✭✭✭✭
    @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.
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