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Mac Silicon OS and VW


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3 hours ago, zoomer said:

At first I thought VP Update may now be multi threaded and therefore

needing more RAM when updating all VPs at a time according to how

many cores/threads are available.

But when I watch VW's Status Bar it looks like it does one VP after the

other anyway.

 

yes, that's how it looks to me too. So I don't really see why the RAM should be a problem.

 

I don't get an error message ... it just crashes or freezes with beach ball.

 

Right now it's freezed, but it only seems that 12GB of swap memory is being used, which doesn't seem that extreme...

 

2099423726_Screenshot2021-11-13at22_46_15.jpg.beb219c41e5a0f635e91093737257ab4.jpg

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20 hours ago, line-weight said:

Something I have noticed running VW on my M1 mac mini.

 

Previously I could update a large number of renderworks viewports on one sheet in one go. I'd simply select them all and press "update". It might take a long time but it would do it.

 

On the M1 this often seems to provoke a crash. I can get away with doing maybe 10 at a time, but if I try it with, say, 25, I often get a crash.

 

I can't exclude this being a VW2021 problem (because I switched to the M1 and VW2021 at around the same time). But wonder if it could be relate to RAM in some way - as noted elsewhere, VW seems to progressively eat up an increasing amount of RAM that can only be released by quitting & reopening. In activity monitor VW is often listed as using more than the installed 16gb.

I get this on my intel MacBook as well. After updating lots of section viewports Vectorworks uses lots of memory and becomes very sluggish. It’s like there is a memory leak in the section generation process. I also have to quit and reopen to be able to continue working.

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16 minutes ago, Will said:

I get this on my intel MacBook as well. After updating lots of section viewports Vectorworks uses lots of memory and becomes very sluggish. It’s like there is a memory leak in the section generation process. I also have to quit and reopen to be able to continue working.

Hm. i wonder if this deserves its own thread in the troubleshooting section then.

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30 minutes ago, line-weight said:

Hm. i wonder if this deserves its own thread in the troubleshooting section then.

 

I'm not sure if this is exactly the same topic being discussed here but I definitely have issues updating section VPs. I NEVER attempt to update more than one at a time. Even then I hit the button with trepidation. See:

 

I have mentioned before the fact that even after the operation has completed the memory use remains high + I'm required to close + reopen VW to get things back to normal again.

 

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54 minutes ago, Will said:

I get this on my intel MacBook as well. After updating lots of section viewports Vectorworks uses lots of memory and becomes very sluggish. It’s like there is a memory leak in the section generation process. I also have to quit and reopen to be able to continue working.

 

I think this is a very old problem that moving to 64 bit did a lot to lessen, but wasn't completely resolved. I also find section and detail viewports to be the main cause. Something interesting about those viewports is, if their crops are stretched or deleted after they're established, the Hidden Line line-work for the rest of the model is already there, calculated and available without updating.  

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6 hours ago, Tom W. said:

 

I'm not sure if this is exactly the same topic being discussed here but I definitely have issues updating section VPs. I NEVER attempt to update more than one at a time. Even then I hit the button with trepidation. See:

 

 

sections through site models have their own issues for me ... but in this case (ie what I'm doing at the moment which prompted my comment) there is no sectioning involved - just perspective views rendered in renderworks.

 

They do all contain a site model though. I might try turning the site model off just to see if that makes any difference.

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21 hours ago, Will said:

I get this on my intel MacBook as well. After updating lots of section viewports Vectorworks uses lots of memory and becomes very sluggish. It’s like there is a memory leak in the section generation process. I also have to quit and reopen to be able to continue working.


I did a Bug for the same reason

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2 hours ago, line-weight said:

 

Did you make a troubleshooting thread in the forum, or just file as a bug?

 

And was this recently, or some time ago?

 

I guess you have not had any response as to whether it's something we might see fixed?

 

I think that is a important issue and the VW team are working to find the solution. And we need always to find the best way to do the thinks, now

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Eurghh... as I suspected, no longer being able to reliably render multiple viewports in one go presents me with some headaches.

 

There is something peculiar about the way VW does renders, that means that rendering the exact same viewport with the exact same settings, doesn't always produce a pixel-perfect identical result. One use case for me involves multiple views of the same scene, each with identical viewpoint, but with some changes to the model geometry in each. I need to be able to extract these images into a photo editing application where I can lay them exactly on top of each other. It all needs to line up at a pixel level. But infuriatingly, unless you render all these versions in one go, VW is liable to output a bunch of images all with slightly different pixel dimensions. So, updating all the viewports in one go is the only way I have of achieving this. And if VW can't update multiple viewports without crashing......

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27 minutes ago, Andrew Pollock said:

I hit update all viewports and get coffee. When I return  I can look at my whole drawing set.

 

yes this is my habit too.

 

It looks a bit like this is related to the vectorworks version rather than the type of mac hardware though.

 

Either way I would agree it might be a reason to hesitate from upgrading if you are still on VW2018.

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I'm seeing it on Big Sur / M1 / VW2021.

And there are reports further up the thread seeing it on Intel Macs.

So I don't think it's as straightforward as that.

 

I seem to be OK doing multiple viewports up to a certain number, and then problems above that number. So maybe everyone will find a different threshold depending on all sorts of variables including hardware, software, and drawing size.

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For what it's worth... I've been doing some testing of something else in VW2022 and rendering a viewport does not do the same thing of hogging memory that happens in VW2021 - the memory appears to get used while the render is happening, but then it gets released again when it's completed. It looks like this in activity monitor:

 

507634788_Screenshot2021-11-23at09_26_47.jpg.11a545dce4d065d87c283be1ea836d87.jpg

Edited by line-weight
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On 11/23/2021 at 3:46 PM, digitalcarbon said:

I'm seriously paralyzed with fear of upgrading my OS or VW...this is no longer a sustainable paradigm.

Nothing in the Apple-Vectorworks ecosystem is a serious problem. Yes there are some minor temporary bugs, but there are always minor issues we have to work around. Nothing that inhibits normal every day work on the Mac OS.

I'm unhappy about some of the bugs, but none of our clients will fire us because we have to use a different sketch-render method short term.

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Nonetheless, if a new VW version and/or a new macOS version mean that VW becomes less usable than the setup you are currently using, it makes sense to hold off upgrading. That's what I'm doing.

 

Whether the initial release of a new version of a software being less useful than the one it replaces is a "serious problem" ... I guess it depends on your opinion about what's acceptable to give to people without describing what they are getting as a beta version.

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  • 2 weeks later...

So because of this September to December 31st "upgrade anxiety" season...I have been moving as much of my work as I can to Onshape...Keeping VW only for assembling the site & syncing with civil...Granted, I'm not doing any architecture (doors, windows. wall tool, etc)

 

Not sure what I would do if I was working on a building.

 

Edited by digitalcarbon
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51 minutes ago, digitalcarbon said:

So because of this September to December 31st "upgrade anxiety" season...I have been moving as much of my work as I can to Onshape...Keeping VW only for assembling the site & syncing with civil...Granted, I'm not doing any architecture (doors, windows. wall tool, etc)

 

Not sure what I would do if I was working on a building.

 

Can you explain your reasoning?

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  • 3 months later...

I am still waiting, like I did with my M1 Mac Mini.

First they are hard to get for a few months, from independent shops,

which is less expensive.

(While not as much cheaper as it was in the past with Intel Desktops)

 

Maybe I will even wait until WWDC, hoping a Mac Pro will be presented.

Unlikely I could ever afford one but just to see where Apple will go to

with possible RAM or GPU extensions - or not - and if it's better to

wait for M2 series.

Which could also influence Mac Studio being more future proof - or not

and which config to choose.

(Or if an unexpected large iMac will come one day nevertheless)

 

 

I am not pleased by the performance scaling Max vs Ultra,

Macbook Pro Max vs Studio Max, or binned vs full cores.

Concerning GPU performance beside Blender GPU Rendering.

(Even for Video Editing accelerations does not really scale well)

And it looks like, especially the more GPU cores you have, the

slower they are clocked and never use the max power target

which Apple promised in their slides.

Or if the larger memory options are useful or not..

 

 

Therefore I am overwhelmed by the configurations.

If it does not scale it would be better with the Max only.

Kind of another interims Mac again !?

But with a useful configuration it would be already 3000+ €

anyway.

Or an Ultra - and hoping that Firmware, macOS and Software

updates make full use of the Ultra in the future ?

(Like it never happened for my Trash Can (interims) Mac)

Edited by zoomer
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