VW open in the Background

[Kevin McAllister]

I stumbled onto this under the battery icon on my MacBook Pro today -

 

 

I'd never noticed that OSX listed this before. It was interesting to me because VW was hidden and idle while I was working in another app. Are VW and CineRender really using significant resources any time they are open, even when they are in the background doing nothing?

 

Kevin

 

[PVA - Admin]

We use a LOT of power. This happens for a few reasons:

1) Both do not allow the hard drive to sleep, to prevent the risk of file corruption.

 

2) Both are set to force the dedicated high performance GPU option in machines that have dual graphics.

3) Both are set to prevent sleep, to stop file operations and renders that take a long time from being interrupted by the machines sleep/wake timers.

Power usage is considered and extremely low priority in development at the moment, with most of the focus being placed on speed and stability enhancements.

[rDesign]

3 hours ago, JimW said:

We use a LOT of power. This happens for a few reasons:

1) Both do not allow the hard drive to sleep, to prevent the risk of file corruption.

 

2) Both are set to force the dedicated high performance GPU option in machines that have dual graphics.

3) Both are set to prevent sleep, to stop file operations and renders that take a long time from being interrupted by the machines sleep/wake timers.

Power usage is considered and extremely low priority in development at the moment, with most of the focus being placed on speed and stability enhancements.

 

@JimW- what you're describing here contradicts everything that we were lead to believe in this entire thread where @Bruce Kiefferand I were asking why our Macs were not automatically going to sleep while Vw is left running in the background.

 

Are you now saying that, in fact - Vectorworks does prevent Macs from automatically going to sleep? 

 

(I still don't understand why Vw doesn't allow the HD to sleep even if no Vw files are open, just the application itself).

[PVA - Admin]

I know that 2017 is specifically supposed to force use of the more powerful GPU and avoid letting the system run in low power options to save performance loss, however in version 2015/2016 I think this was happening and not happening at random, as every time I asked engineering about it the response was similar to "That's not right..."

However, the way macOS handles applications that need more graphics hardware has also changed, and we changed to utilize it properly as opposed to whatever was happening before. But to clarify, if NO files are open I don't think sleep is supposed to be prevented, however with the issues that we are seeing related to render cache not clearing properly (black viewports, misplaced objects in renderworks modes, etc) might be related, but that's a complete guess.

Generally, the logic is that when you have Vectorworks open and you're doing work, you're going to be plugged in and want to be using as much of your hardware as possible. But yes, this behavior and the intentions behind it have changed over the last few years, with little to no concern given to power savings whether plugged in or not in favor of performance and stability. 

 

[rDesign]

Thanks JimW for the clarification / verification (I'm not crazy!)

For the record, that other thread was about Vw2016 & 2017 sleep behavior, not Vw2015 (which slept just fine). This all started in Vw2016.

 

I haven't tested again since installing SP3, but for me - 2017 will not automatically go to sleep with NO files open.

I hope that development's focus on performance and stability will start to pay off.

[PVA - Admin]

I'll take another look in a bit today actually, I hadn't given this much thought since that conversation, but I have a bunch of renderings going now that I need to wait on. 

I would certainly think that with no documents open and no network user folders being shared or anything like that, it would be completely safe for Vectorworks to sleep. I DO think I remember a conversation about Cinerender being difficult to wake/sleep reliably, I'll check with the rendering team and see if that's something I actually heard or if I'd eaten too much pizza before bed.

[Kevin McAllister]

Thanks Jim. I appreciate the explanation. I'm surprised VW needs to lock all these resources if it's open in the background and not doing anything but perhaps it doesn't know it's in the background and not doing anything 

 

It's not really a big issue for me as I try to be plugged in when using it. 

 

Kevin

[Bruce Kieffer]

I've been manually putting my Mac to sleep. To me files open or no files open should make no difference, if my Mac is set to auto sleep, then it should and Vectorworks should not stop that from happening unless Vectorworks is performing a rendering operation.

[PVA - Admin]

Files being open, even if they aren't actively autosaving when the Mac goes to sleep can cause file corruption issues, so that is intentionally avoided for the time being until the changes to the VWX file format allow for more flexibility. A similar tech upgrade is also what many users are waiting on for the long requested removal of VWX versioning, or at least limiting the version change to every few years to help take exporting out of the backwards compatibility workflow.

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