What's Causing My Powerbook G4 to Lag?

[Ethan]

6 months ago, I switched platforms from PC to Mac and upgraded VW Spotlight from v9 to v11. Since then I have been having a recurring problem of certain Vectorworks drawings causing my whole system to hang for 5-10 second intervals.

I have no idea what the exact cause of the problem is, but I do know these things:

- It does not happen with all files, only some. (95% of the files I produce are light plots in Spotlight.)

- Larger, more complicated Spotlight files never lagged my old PC like this, which had half the processor speed and the same amount of RAM.

- This does not appear to be a RAM issue, because Activity Monitor shows Vectorworks grabbing 70-99% of my processor activity for 5-10 seconds a few times each minute.

- The problem has been occuring since I first bought the computer and installed Vectorworks, so reformatting will not likely fix it.

- My OLD system configuration (NO problem):

Vectorworks Spotlight 9.5.2

Pentium III 866MHz

512MB RAM

32MB Video RAM

Windows ME

- My CURRENT configuration:

Vectorworks Spotlight 11.0.1

Powerbook G4 1.5GHz

512MB RAM

64MB Video RAM

Mac OS 10.3.5

I'm usually pretty savvy when it comes to figuring this stuff out, but this time I'm totally stumped.

If anybody out there is running a similar configuration, I would be happy to send you one of the files to test.

Has anybody else encountered a bug like this?

Ethan

ethan@E-Lumination.net

[ 12-07-2004, 10:37 PM: Message edited by: Ethan ]

[Guest]

Have you run Disk Utility on this Mac since you got it, or even in the past week or so?

[Kees W]

How is your automatic save set up? (prefereces, under session tab)

VectorWorks has the very annoying habit of creating the backup file in a folder at the same location where the actual file resides.

When a file is located on a network, this can cause large slow-down when the network is busy or otherwise slow.

When working on large files, I actually have to turn auto-saving off for lack of an option to create a local backup.

[APE Design Ctr]

Hi Ethan, to save you some time .. basically I have concluded that it is an OS X issue, based on geometry calculations, and NNA indicates that this problem should be solved with an upgrade to OS 10.4 Tiger.

The update cant come any quicker for many of us on this board including myself.

[Ethan]

Thanks Ion,

I found, after reading the strings that you posted, that opening VW11 in Classic 9 appears to solve this issue in all of the delinquent files. No need to touch my network settings, automatic save settings, or Disk Utility. It just appears that Vectorworks 11 doesn't like Panther, for whatever reason.

Still, I only wonder why it happens in some files, but not in others. Also, I know people running the same configuration as me that would certainly complain about the Object Info Palette speed, but never encountered the crippling problem that I have.

Ethan

[ 12-08-2004, 08:47 PM: Message edited by: Ethan ]

[Guest]

Ethan,

You shouldn't have problems with VW 11 and panther. You should however run Disk Utility so you can see if you have any permissions out of control causing the problem. We can work from there if that doesn't resolve the problem.

You can also check to see if you have the last two items in the VW prefes dialog box under the first tab. If you have either check marked, please note which ones.

[ 12-08-2004, 09:56 PM: Message edited by: Katie ]

[ionw]

Other than the speed issue that have been well documented on this board, right Katie?

I don't have any problems with the stability of V11 in Panther rather it is the operations (like selection of many objects) that take 10 or more times as long in Panther.

Paul has been very candid on the boards, and this seems to be a problem Apple blindsided the NNA developer's with if one believes Paul. I, for one, do believe him. I've used every public release of OS X since the days of Rhapsody and the original OSX Server. There has been a steady increase of System resources by OS X as it evolved. Apple has also made major changes under the hood in virtually every major release and some minor releases as well.

I will be interested to see how it all shakes out as Tiger and VW 12 are released next year.

ion

[Guest]

Ion,

Yes, there are some issues that Paul has discussed, however not ALL problems fall into this category. If there is an option to try something, I am going to ask the user to try it in the event that it can be resolved by an easy operation.

[Guest]

Neither Tiger nor VW 12 have confirmed releases for next year. Please be careful with posting inforamtion about these topics without official documentation.

[Jonathan Pickup]

turn off all your networking unless you are connected to the network.

Turn off file sharing, appletalk etc.

[ionw]

Ethan, take a look at these discussions, see if this answers any of your questions...well other than why is it still an issue. Please note two things:

I have always been and will be for the forseeable future a Mac user

This issue seems to be as much Apple's fault as NNA's, It seems to me as hard as Apple is trying to court architects, it would be in their best issue to work closely with NNA to resolve it.

ion

PC vs Mac Speed issues

V11 Speed

V11 speed on G4

Slow V11 Slow v11

[mike m oz]

Why do we have to wait for Tiger for this problem to be fixed.

NNA should be pressuring Apple to fix it now.

A lot of the pleasure of using this program has gone on the MAC platform. The innacurate 2D snapping to objects makes tasks like dimensioning a tedious chore where once it was relatively straightforward. Dimensions regularly come up wrong because they haven't snapped properly, and the snapping of dimensions to other dimensions just doesn't work at all.

Productivity is shot to hell and the frustration levels are extremely high.

I don't care what the problem is I just want it fixed!

[ 12-09-2004, 09:35 AM: Message edited by: mike m oz ]

[ionw]

Katie one of the advantages of just being a user of these products I get to make generalized comments based on my past experience. Sure I could be wrong but I have not business or contractual agreements with either company. I pay attention to development cycles and make a prediction. As Andrew's Signature reads, I am not an official spokesman for either Apple or NNA

ion

[APE Design Ctr]

Here Here.