VW Icon in the Dock?

[ojardnas]

Just installed VW2016 on an older iMac (2.8GHz i5), now running 10.11.2. So far, Ok, if a little slow...especially to launch, but seems to work Ok (some graphics updates, no doubt related to the old card)

Loaded the VW icon on the Dock, via drag-n-drop from the Applications folder.

The VW icon - the emblem itself - does not show up...the old school Mac icon of paper/pencil/brush/ruler shows up instead. VW2016 launches from that icon.

overall, not a showstopper, just a minor bug of (hopefully) no consequence.

Ideas?

a sign of future challenges?

[Kevin McAllister]

Try this. Remove the icon by dragging it from the dock. Then double click and run VW from the applications folder. When its up and running and the icon is in the dock, right click on the icon and under options choose "Keep In Dock". When you quit VW it will now stay in the dock. Does this method keep the correct icon appearance?

Kevin

[ojardnas]

That method doesn't seem to work...removed, opened VW from Applications, and the icon show up old school...

[Kevin McAllister]

That's very strange. I'm running the same OS with VW2016 and have no issues.

Kevin

[Gilbert Osmond]

I also notice that VW 2016 is slow to launch in 10.11.2.

Particularly so because it is *slower* launching a clean install of VW 2016 SP2 on a clean install of 10.11.2 on a brand new, mostly empty Samsung EVO 850 SSD located on the internal SATA-III bus --- than launching a year-old install of VW 2016 on my mucked-up, well-used Yosemite 10.10 setup on a much smaller, older, almost 95% full SSD.

[PVA - Admin]

How many seconds would you say, on average?

The very FIRST launch will be significantly slower than a normal launch often, but yes normally after that a clean install's launch should be fairly snappy, only slowing down once you add a number of favorite files to the resource browser.

[Kevin McAllister]

I find VW very slow to start too. At Christmas I did a clean install of OSX and of VW for the first time in a long while.....

KM

[Gilbert Osmond]

How many seconds would you say, on average?

The very FIRST launch will be significantly slower than a normal launch often, but yes normally after that a clean install's launch should be fairly snappy, only slowing down once you add a number of favorite files to the resource browser.

I just did some tests on this. This is on an clean install that has now been launched ~15 times total, working out any "first-launch" setup issues, and getting the OS caching to an optimal state.

From dock click to splash screen: 18 seconds.

Splash screen to "Untitled 1" document open & ready to work: 35 seconds.

Grand total startup time, 52-56 seconds (range.)

This is with the default Architect workspace selected, and with an empty Resource Browser.

The rest of the system operates very fast indeed -- new Samsung EVO 850 SSD boot device (500GB, only 20% used,) which is on the internal SATA-III bus of the Mac Mini. VW 2016 and all associated files & content are also located on this SSD. No other storage devices connected or mounted.

Safari launches in <1 second, Mail (with 40,000 messsages and 300+ subfolders) in 3 to 4 seconds, LibreOffice v5 (a pretty cantankerous mass of code) in 3 to 4 seconds. Again, all of these are "cached/optimized" after several launch/quit cycles.

Let me know if I can do other testing or submit logs on this.

The hardware & OS config in my profile signature is up to date.

Edited March 18, 2016 by Gilbert Osmond

[PVA - Admin]

The below tests were done with the second launch of Vectorworks on the machine after a full reboot, time was measured from clicking the icon to a blank Untitled1 file being ready for use. None of these machines had any favorite files added to make the comparison fair:

On my 10.10.5 Macbook Pro with PCIe storage (which is similar to an SSD but silly fast, around 1200-1500MB/s read) Vectorworks 2016 SP2 loads in 17.8 seconds.

On an older iMac running 11.11.3 with a standard 5400RPM HDD (around 80 MB/s read, so MUCH slower) 2016 SP2 launches in 22.1 seconds.

On my Windows 10 Lenovo Y510p laptop with a standard 5400RPM HDD (around 70 MB/s read) 2016 SP2 launches in 9.8 seconds.

On my rendering machine here, running Windows 7 on a 4-disk RAID 0 (around 390 MB/s read) 2016 SP2 launches in 11.8 seconds.

On average this matches my experience, where I notice Windows load times are much faster overall for Vectorworks compared to Mac regardless of hardware. They call different types of resources to do the same things on both platforms, so this isn't entirely unexpected. What speeds are others here getting on average?

[PVA - Admin]

From dock click to splash screen: 18 seconds.

Splash screen to "Untitled 1" document open & ready to work: 35 seconds.

Grand total startup time, 52-56 seconds (range.)

That's incredibly slow! Create a new admin account on your machine:

'>http://kbase.vectorworks.net/questions/805/Creating+a+New+User+Account+%28Mac+OS+X%29

Then once loaded in, time it twice, the first time you launch it then shut it down and time the second time as well in the same manner you did for your previous test, please.

[Gilbert Osmond]

From dock click to splash screen: 18 seconds.

Splash screen to "Untitled 1" document open & ready to work: 35 seconds.

Grand total startup time, 52-56 seconds (range.)

That's incredibly slow! Create a new admin account on your machine:

'>http://kbase.vectorworks.net/questions/805/Creating+a+New+User+Account+%28Mac+OS+X%29

Then once loaded in, time it twice, the first time you launch it then shut it down and time the second time as well in the same manner you did for your previous test, please.

Hmm, a bit embarrassed here -- did as you suggested, in the clean user account I did have to re-enter my serial number & re-activate. Once that was done, on the 5th consecutive launch I am getting:

Time to splash screen: 16 seconds

Time to Doc open/ready to work: 19 seconds.

What do I need to examine in my main user folder(s)?

[PVA - Admin]

That's where it gets hard, everyone's user account is different, and it can dramatically affect things like load times. Things to look for:

Any sort of backup utilities running in your account constantly, Time Machine can sometimes do this if its set to back up your application folder or wherever Vectorworks is stored.

Security software, antimalware and antivirus apps generally give us trouble especially on the Mac side, they tend to overstep and want to check every little thing Vectorworks does.

Window/dock management utilities like Spectacle or Shiftit sometimes dislike Vectorworks' palette system and when it goes to load them, can sometimes try to manage them before giving up. This isn't really a problem with those apps, just the strange application-controlled way we implement the palette system.

[Gilbert Osmond]

Thanks for the suggestion, I was able to track it down quickly.

I had a corrupted workspace in /Users//Library/Application Support/Vectorworks/2016/Workspaces.

I removed the offending custom workspace and launch times are back to normla. In this case the workspace showed a pallette from the 3rd party plugin "Extensio," which is used to produce various kinds of piping & drainage runs. I'm not certain but it seems likely the Extensio plugin has something to do with it.

And/or, what it might be is that I did *not* reinstall the Extensio plugin with my clean install of VW 2016. So probably VW 2016 was just searching for the plugin and then timing out, resulting in long delay.

Edited March 18, 2016 by Gilbert Osmond

[PVA - Admin]

OH! I'm sorry, I thought it was a clean install. Yes, workspaces and other preferences from previous installs can dramatically change things. My tests were all done with stock workspaces and prefs.

[Hippocode]

And/or, what it might be is that I did *not* reinstall the Extensio plugin with my clean install of VW 2016. So probably VW 2016 was just searching for the plugin and then timing out, resulting in long delay.

The plug-in itself shouldn't be causing any delays as it doesn't do anything special on start up.

It could be, because you used a workspace with these tools included, but not installed, it does trigger a delay but I wonder why VW would do that.

Give me a shout when you run into this issue again.

Edited March 18, 2016 by Hippocode