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Speed Up Vectorworks


willofmaine

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A really great new feature of Vectorworks would be to speed it up.  Brand new template created from scratch in 2021.  Brand new project, with just a couple of PDF plan underlays, a few walls, and some basic resources.  Every other new dimension, and now simple lines, require a pause of 2 or 3 seconds, and often the spinning beachball.  In Vectorworks, I wish we could pull dimensions and draw lines in real time.

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I am not seeing anything like the delays you are describing on a 2019 Powerbook 16".

 

Can you try creating a new user on your Mac and try and run VW in that user account? Perhaps there is something in your user folder that is slowing you down. If you don't see delays we can try to clean up your user folder.

 

I did run into something like this a very long time ago, maybe VW2012 or before. I could never find the issue and ended up wiping the hard drive and staring from scratch with a clean install because it was something deep in the user account, not in the Vectorworks user folder and I could never isolate what the problem was. I think @michaelk had to do something similar one time.

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Last time I had this problem was around the same time as Pat.

 

I was super disappointed when I booted into safe mode and VW ran like a race car. 🙂. (well… by comparison)

 

I don't remember exactly what solved it, but I remember finding all kinds of old processes like some Adobe thing that was launching every couple seconds and looking for an old version of Photoshop or something that was long since deleted.  It would generate a blast of error messages in the console log and immediately launch again.  At that point I probably had over 10 years of migrating installations from one computer to the next.

 

A "nuke and pave" fixed it.

 

 

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Hello,
I had exasperating slowdowns for a while, and after many tests and feedback with DesignExpress, I found that this was "simply" due to the fact that I had downloaded and installed all the VectorWorks libraries, objects, textures, etc., and that I had been using them for a long time.
By emptying the library and keeping only the bare minimum, it worked again quickly ... Computer Mysteries 🤔
Otherwise, I had slowdowns due to my custom configuration that had experienced difficulties migrating from one version of VectorWorks to the other.
If it helps.
Have a nice day.
Best regards.
Edgar

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Thanks @michaelk and @Edgar RAMEL for the feedback.

 

@Pat Stanford I shut down Vectorworks overnight.  Today, before attempting to create a new user account, I tried to replicate the problem in a brand new blank file.  I couldn't.  I imported one of the same PDF underlays, and still couldn't recreate the issue.  Then I started with a new file created from my template.  I tried to re-create the (relatively few) steps that I'd taken in my project file, such as importing the PDF underlay, deleting a story, deleting and renaming some design layers, and importing wall styles from an older project.  Still couldn't recreate the problem.  So, for now, I think I won't pursue creating a new user account.  Did just restarting Vectorworks help?  Yesterday, I'd quit Vectorworks and re-opened it before starting my new project, so that was low on my list of possible remedies...  If it happens again, I'll try the new user account thing.  Thanks!

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One thing I've found helpful to monitor the state of my computer when running VW:

 

In Finder create a favorite folder in the sidebar that links to /private/var/vm [Never touch anything in this folder.  Just watch it]. VM probably stands for virtual memory. 

 

When you first start your computer this file will contain sleepimage and swapfile0.  As your computer needs more RAM than it has, it swaps files from RAM to the hard drive in these swapfiles to free up space in RAM.  

 

In the OS I'm using each swapfile is 1 GB.  Other versions used different sizes.

 

Check how many swapfiles you have when your computer is running well and how many you have when it gets laggy.  If you just leave that window open on another screen you can watch the files get created, and sometimes catch them getting deleted. 

 

Back in the old days, I used to restart VW when I got above swapfile12.  I almost never see that many swapfiles in recent years.

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1 hour ago, michaelk said:

It's a secret hidden folder 🙂.  In Finder, Go > Go to Folder… /private/var/vm

 

image.thumb.png.e713116a2235dcf9d83063177d9c37a1.png

 

 

 

Interesting,

opened VW but hadn't anything in private/var/vm.

Loaded a file and still nothing in /vm/

 

But I am on M1 Mac, perhaps it sits elsewhere ....

 

I never experienced any RAM or Swap issues with VW on Mac though.

Maybe because I always rejected VW's Telemetry ...

which seemed to cause issues in the past with overfilling temp files.

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