VW 2008 Performance problem

[jeremyb]

I am running VW2008 on a pc with Windows XP Home 3, with a Pentium 4 1.8 Ghz CPU with 2Gb RAM and a Sapphire Radeon x1600 Pro graphics card. Problem: after using program for maybe 1 hr or so pc slows to crawl or stops, VW freezes and using up 90 - 100% of CPU. Sometimes after wait of poss 15 minutes things start going again and I can start work again. Clearly this is a major pain and I need to sort it. I think that this may be a graphics card problem - or is it my CPU speed? I don't want to waste my money so any help gratefully received. Thanks.

[IanH]

It could be any number of things. You don't say how large your model is and what you were doing at the time. Also, it would be useful to have some diagnostics from the performance monitor - see below.

Make sure that you have the latest service patches, IIRC that there was a performance issue that was fixed on one of the SP's.

A very quick guide to the Windows performance monitor...

Vectorworks can be very intensive on resources, so running out of memory or high CPU usage can be perfectly normal. Large models, rendering, high resolution graphics, textures, images etc are all resource intensive.

The performance monitor is available from the task monitor under the performance tab. If you are not running admin rights, then there may be other processes that you cannot see directly, but the performance tab will give you an overall feel as to what is going on and what is running low on resources.

If you are running 2 or more CPU's/cores. If both CPU's are near 100% and you are not rendering, then it is likely that VW is not at fault - VW only uses 1 CPU so if both are high, then something else is also causing excessive CPU usage. You can see what the culprits are by looking at the processes tab and sorting on CPU usage.

If running 1 cpu, sort on CPU to see what processes are eating up the cycles. If Vectorworks is one of them, and its not 100% CPU or very close all of the time, and you are not rendering, then a faster processor may help.

IF vectorworks is 100% or very close, most of the time, then is possibly an application issue. Close it and restart.

If page file usage is very active, then you are probably running a little low on RAM as physical RAM is pages back and forward to page file. Close down any unused applications and memory hogs - you can see these by viewing the processes tab and sorting on memory usage. RAM is cheap, so if it is available and easy to fit, then maybe fit another GB. Revisit page file settings after adding more RAM.

If the values in the commit charge section are very similar, then you are likely to be running close to the limit of virtual memory. Either let windows control page file size itself or up the page file size yourself - a general rule of thumb for page file usage use to be 1.5 times the RAM size, but in the days of large amounts of RAM, this does not necessarily hold true any more, but it is a starting guide. This is controlled under the advanced/performance tab in the system properties - right click my computer then properties. A reboot is likely.

Rogue applications can be killed, either by terminating the process, or for stubbon applications, the whole process tree.

Hope this helps.

[Ray Libby]

Update to Service Pack 3, then update your signature.