SLLOOWWW

[Tom Klaber]

Vectorworks seems to be running slower and slower.  It will just stop and think about nothing for MINUTES.  A change in sheet layer will be met with 3 to 5 minutes sitting there.  No operation done - just a change in view.  The view is visible - but it will go into Not Responding for MINUTES.  What is going on??  What is it thinking about?? Its just a sheet with 2 elevations.  It is so frustrating. 

[Jeremy Best]

On 7/2/2022 at 1:08 AM, line-weight said:

But if I add "memory used" + "cached files" + "swap used" I only get about 32GB.

 

Why don't they match up?

 

Because the data moved to 'Swap' is compressed. Hover your cursor over each type and you'll get a pop-up explanation. 

[Jeremy Best]

I have a probable-cause-and-solution that likely applies to @line-weight's scenario, and might also apply to @Tom Klaber's. 

 

Solution: 

When mousing over areas of your document that features high quantities of geometry, use Suspend Snapping. Either double-tap the ~ key (below Esc) or click the ⏸ button in the Snap Palette (in VW2022 onwards). 

 

Reasoning: 

In Brief: 

Vectorworks is struggling to load the quantity of data which is used to trigger cursor behaviours, such as cursor cues, preselection highlighting etc. Suspending snapping retires all or most of this processing. 

 

In More Detail: 

Vectorworks has to load and process both the geometry you see, but also an 'overlay' of all the points and lines etc that trigger the various mouse cursor behaviours as it passes over them. This is what invokes the cursor cues, preselection highlighting etc. The more geometry/vertices present, the more there is to load and the more processing take place as the cursor passes over the drawing. This is why the non-cached Wireframe Sheet Layer Viewports described by @line-weight consume more memory than rendered ones. - Rendered Viewports don't include the lines of object edges that are obscured by solid objects, but Wireframe viewports include all lines and vertices of every, visible, object. 

 

Evidence: 

Recently I was analysing a user's extremely high resolution site model and its 3D polygon source data. Despite the required resolution of the site model being 100 mm, the source data had line segments that were smaller than 1 mm and the site was about 370 x 280 meters. Working with this data invoked the spinning wheel frequently and for a very long time. I noticed the significant lag of the preselection highlighting following the cursor. I've experienced similar slowdowns in the Annotation layer when passing the cursor over areas of dense geometry from objects in the Sheet Layer Viewport concerned. If you suspend snapping, Vectorworks no longer has to load and process all the object data that relates to cursor behaviours. 

[line-weight]

Suspending snapping doesn't make any difference for me unfortunately. Tried in vw2021 and vw2022.

 

When I view the sheet layer, with snapping activated, I can mouse over the wireframe views without any issue - the cursor will pick up lots of snap points but can move around smoothly.

 

The problems come when I try to zoom or pan. This is when everything seizes up. It makes no difference whether snapping is suspended or not.

[Jeremy Best]

16 hours ago, line-weight said:

The problems come when I try to zoom or pan. This is when everything seizes up. It makes no difference whether snapping is suspended or not.

 

I'd love the educational opportunity to examine (and hopefully diagnose issues in) your file. If I provide you an upload link (via DM) are you happy to share it with me? 

[line-weight]

5 hours ago, Jeremy Best said:

 

I'd love the educational opportunity to examine (and hopefully diagnose issues in) your file. If I provide you an upload link (via DM) are you happy to share it with me? 

Yes sure - just drop me a message.

[Tom Klaber]

On 7/5/2022 at 6:39 AM, line-weight said:

Suspending snapping doesn't make any difference for me unfortunately. Tried in vw2021 and vw2022.

 

When I view the sheet layer, with snapping activated, I can mouse over the wireframe views without any issue - the cursor will pick up lots of snap points but can move around smoothly.

 

The problems come when I try to zoom or pan. This is when everything seizes up. It makes no difference whether snapping is suspended or not.

I have this problem too.  I am not a technical guy - but there seems to be a memory leak.  I exported a set - things were tolerable, but I saw an error - fixed it and now have been waiting 1 hour and 40 minutes to export the set.  

 

 

Its not using any GPU  - a moderate amount of CPU - but just gobbling memory.  I even spent the last 2 weeks redrawing all the interior elevations from live BIM interiors to old school dead ones because it was too painful to maintain the BIM ones.  No performance improvements.   

 

Its starting to get unusable.  

 

 

[Jeremy Best]

Hey @Tom Klaber, 

 

Thanks for the above insight. Particularly good to know that Vectorworks published the results at a 'tolerable' speed at first, then when publishing the same set after some changes took much longer. Not at all conclusive, but I can see there may be something for engineers to address here. Put aside this possibility for a moment and let's help you get around the current problem: High memory consumption (legitimate or not). 

 

When I'm assisting one of our users and I see memory consumption at such a high percent, I would normally relay the following information to one of our users: 

• When memory demands get high, the computer moves some of the data in memory to temporary storage on the hard drive, in order to extend memory capacity. 
• Hard drives are slower than memory. [Mechanical] HDDs - particularly older ones - are super slow compared to real memory. SSDs are super fast by comparison but the transferring of data to them is still way slower than the direct use of real memory. 
• It's not just the moving of data. Some actions require the exchanging of data between these two places, which is likely even slower. 
• The memory consumption you see is not the true size of everything stored in memory. A lot of it will be compressed. Decompressing memory before it is used will add to the processing required to use it…
• TL:DR; Reduce the amount of memory 'pressure,' by closing programs and internet browser tabs you aren't using right now. 

I see Google Chrome (famous for hogging memory) is using a massive chunk (5GB) of your memory and you have 50 tabs open. That's a great place to free up some memory and might save you from having to restart Vectorworks after performing actions that consume lots of memory. 

[line-weight]

My perception is that it'll just use up whatever memory is available - so quitting other applications may free a bit of space initially but VW will quickly eat it up and still start using significant amounts of swap memory on the HD (in my case an SSD).

 

Then it will use up everything it can on the HD and either everything simply comes to a stop or I might get a message "out of application memory".

 

I've tried freeing up additional space on the HD. For some things this does seem to help - for example, in VW2022 it appeared to allow VW to render out a large number of RW viewports in one go (eventually) whereas before clearing the additional space, it would just get to "out of application memory" and stop. But clearing out HD space didn't seem to help, doing the same thing in VW2021.

 

But as for extreme sluggishness in navigating around sheet layers - clearing additional HD space seems to offer no benefit.

 

[Tom Klaber]

@Jeremy Best

 

Chrome is a hog for sure.  But just so you know - that is not 50 tabs - as chrome now treats all processes as sperate tasks - so some of those are plugins ect - but yes - running at about double what the normal is, but as @line-weight says - it does not matter - VW just gobbles whatever is available and never seems to give it back.   There are certain 2 file combinations that we simply can not open together as the system instantly runs out of memory.  These are not big projects or big files.  I was so taken by the expected performance upgrades that we bought new computers for the office - but things are getting appreciably worse.  I sometimes need to restart VW 6 times in a day - and that only after suffering 1 to 2 seconds response time for a good chunk of time.   Whatever is going on - it does not feel like my 3080 is being used as it should.  I have 32GB of RAM and another 8GBs on the GPU itself - it feels like that should be more than sufficient to do our little 2D interior elevations of our single family homes....

[Jeff Prince]

@Tom Klaber have you considered reverting to a previous version of Vectorworks?  I have 2022 installed for playing with, but doing my work in 2021.  I have a new computer on order, but I'm really considering cancelling that and just staying with what works until all the dust settles with VWX and hardware (Mac in my case).  VWX 2022 seems to be cursed.

[Tom Klaber]

I hadn't - these problems do seem more pronounced - but we have been wrestling with similar things for so long - it actually did not occur to me that these issues were isolated to 2022... but maybe worth a try. 

[Jeremy Best]

2 hours ago, Tom Klaber said:

I sometimes need to restart VW 6 times in a day

 

Wow. This degree of interference is severe. So severe that if this were due to a bug, I'd expect to receive a great number of reports from users in our market. - It might be due to a bug, but at this stage I think other causes are more likely. 

 

1 hour ago, jeff prince said:

have you considered reverting to a previous version of Vectorworks?

 

45 minutes ago, Tom Klaber said:

I hadn't - these problems do seem more pronounced - but we have been wrestling with similar things for so long

 

That you have been affected by this poor performance for so long is good evidence that this is caused by something other than software bugs or inefficiencies. 

 

@Tom Klaber, would you be willing to share your file with me? The one you were using during the described slowdowns above. (If yes, message me). 

[urbancolab]

I am just now starting to have this issue with VW 2022. This has never happened to me before. I need this fixed fast.

[Jeremy Best]

On 10/5/2022 at 8:54 AM, urbancolab said:

I am just now starting to have this issue with VW 2022. This has never happened to me before.

 

Hi @urbancolab, 

 

To help evoke replies from other users, please include much more context. There are too many variables that may or may not apply to software problems to leave them unspecified. Please advise: 

• Your operating system. 
• Hardware spec. 
• Vectorworks version and Service Pack. 
  • ⬆️ You should add these to your Forum signature as seen in other user's comments. 
• The version of Vectorworks the file was created in. 
• Situational details. i.e. What happened leading up to the symptoms? 

 

If this happened suddenly and the slowdown correlated with a particular action (such as importing a DXF, DWG or other kind of file with geometry), reverse that action, save the file, restart Vectorworks and see what results. 

 

If this happened suddenly and it didn't correlate with anything as far as you can tell: 

• If your hard drive is nearly full, delete or move out data so that at least 10% is 'free'/unused. 
• Examine and address potentially high memory consumption: 
  • If on Mac: Check your memory pressure graph in Activity Monitor. If it's yellow, orange or red this is the reason for the slowdown. Reduce how many webpages and apps you have open. 
  • If on Win: Open Task Manager and look at memory consumption graph. If it's above ~80% reduce how many webpages and apps you have open. 
• And/Or restart your computer. 

You might have more geometry present (or too far from the Internal Origin) for your computer to handle soundly. There's a lot of file-specific and installation-specific variables that could be responsible but without more insight from you it's just a guessing game. 

[Tom Klaber]

On 10/5/2022 at 4:39 PM, Jeremy Best said:

• Examine and address potentially high memory consumption: 
  • If on Mac: Check your memory pressure graph in Activity Monitor. If it's yellow, orange or red this is the reason for the slowdown. Reduce how many webpages and apps you have open. 
  • If on Win: Open Task Manager and look at memory consumption graph. If it's above ~80% reduce how many webpages and apps you have open. 

I have found it is almost always memory consumption - but always due to Vectoroworks.  We have isolated it to when interior elevations, elevations, or sections viewports get updated, the machine requires a tremendous amount of memory -and it does not give it back.  So you can preform the operation once - and it goes ok - but then everything slows down after that requiring restart. 

 

Quitting chrome will not be enough to save you....

 

That seemed to be one of the new and touted  "features" of 2023 - not completely seizing up after rendering hidden line section viewports.  I have not tested yet. 

[Stéphane]

@Tom Klaber You described exactly what I experience when I do OpenGL renderings in VW2021 SP5. What I observed : 

- Memory pressure stacks after each renders. When memory pressure reaches 34 GB, VW crashes. 

- Save, quit and restart VW release the memory. 

- My routine to prevent a crash when I do OpenGL renders : 1. No more than 5 renders. 2. Save, quit and restart. 3. Back to point 1. 

- I lost a keyboard last Friday because I did 7 renders before saving and had to redo everything 🙂

[line-weight]

On 7/1/2022 at 12:52 PM, line-weight said:

Well I just spent a bit of time doing my favourite procastination/avoiding real work activity: unpaid beta testing for VW.

 

I've compared VW2021 SP5 with VW2022 SP4 (as part of my decision making process about whether I dare move to using VW2022). This is using quite a large file and it's on my mac mini M1 16GB running monterey 12.2.

 

The numbers are gb of memory use by VW according to Activity Monitor.

 

 

Note that 2022 seems to behave better, memory wise, up until step 7. However, once I untick "save VP cache" in document preferences everything starts to go wrong.

 

I have several sheet layers in this file which contain a large number (eg 44) of renderworks viewports. Where these have been rendered out in a previous session, and the completed render images are retained in the file thanks to "save VP cache" being ticked, then VW2022 can deal with that sheet layer. It doesn't use loads of memory, and I can pan and zoom about it reasonably well.

 

But once I've unticked that box, and reopen the file, all of those VPs are shown with a wireframe view of the model, because the rendered images haven't been cached. This causes issues in VW2021 and VW2022 - a much larger amount of memory is used, and panning/zooming around that sheet layer becomes very slow indeed. But it's worse in VW2022 than in VW2021. And when I want to switch to another, similar sheet layer, then VW2021 can cope with this but VW2022 can't.

 

What this means for me, at least with this file, is that I potentially can't operate using VW2022 because as far as I can see, there may be certain sheet layers that I simply can't access. I potentially can't even get at those sheet layers to reduce the number of viewports to a level that VW2022 can deal with. Maybe by keeping "save VP cache" ticked, I can render a sheet layer, save and close the file, reopen it, move to another sheet layer, but that's very laborious especially if it's necessary each time I change something. Or maybe if I left things running with memory at 56gb and beachballs spinning for long enough it would eventually settle, but I suspect not.

 

I'd be interested if anyone else can replicate the same thing. My guess is that you can, if you just increase the number of VPs on a sheet layer to some threshold amount.

 

 

I've repeated these tests in VW2023 SP3

 

 

In summary

 

- VW2023 more memory hungry in general than 2021 and 2022

- there is maybe marginal improvement in navigating around a complex sheet layer, compared to 2022 but not better than 2021

- step 14 shows an improvement on 2022 but again not an improvement on 2021

- step 15 demonstrates that VW will in certain situations still just keep eating more and more memory until it runs out and crashes. Sure, 44 viewports is a lot to do in one go but I don't see why it can't just deal with a batch of manageable size, release memory, do the next batch, etc.

 

NB that when it eats up 80GB of memory this is on a mac mini with 16GB RAM!

 

@Stéphane if you are having memory problems in VW2021 I would suggest that you avoid VW2022 but maybe VW2023 would be OK, that is, not necessarily worse than 2021.

 

[Tom W.]

I am finding VW2023 quite bad for high memory. This is just working on the design layer rather than SLs/VPs. Am finding once a day I need to close all files, close VW + open it again to 'reset' the memory. These are big files (1GB+) but nevertheless, the same files weren't resulting in such high memory in the later SPs VW2022. 

[Tom Klaber]

I have the issue that basically I can not have more than 1 file open - if I open a second file to move information from one project to the other - I get the freezing - where it will not change the active drawing - and I have to close all to get it working again.

[JuanP]

@Tom Klaber Can we please have the files and description of your workflow? is there a copy and paste involved? etc thanks 

 

[Wesley Burrows]

It sure feels like something happened with SP3,   i get random HARD beachball hangs when orbiting in wireframe,  seemingly at random times.   Usually after using the program a while,  sometimes Vectorworks will come back to life after 20 seconds or so,  other times the drawing window just freezes,   I can interact with the tool bars but the drawing is stuck,   once or twice the drawing window turned red, like it crashed the video card driver.   It also likes to beachball so hard the system reboots.    I've never had that happen in any other software.   Only happens when using Vectorworks,   and seems to be file agnostic.   

[mjm]

On 3/25/2022 at 6:29 PM, Tom Klaber said:

Vectorworks seems to be running slower and slower.  It will just stop and think about nothing for MINUTES.  A change in sheet layer will be met with 3 to 5 minutes sitting there.  No operation done - just a change in view.  The view is visible - but it will go into Not Responding for MINUTES.  What is going on??  What is it thinking about?? Its just a sheet with 2 elevations.  It is so frustrating. 

Seeing very similar VWX slowdowns here. More MBP restarts per day than ever before. Super duper irritating.

[_James]

Recently I had some contact with Tech Support about a file that was problematic in 2023 but ran perfectly fine in 2022. They told me that "This may not happen in 2022 as the amount of RAM required to run the software is lower than the amount required in 2023." 

[Wesley Burrows]

I also seem to be seeing this more if there are several VW files open at the same time.   A lot of the same types of stuff happening as mentioned above by others.    I don't understand why this is.    When I deal with even larger amounts of high poly geometry in C4D, (I often replace geometry from VW exports with higher poly replacements for renders) and it goes all day without missing a beat.     I'm not modeling high rises or anything,   just live events.   I have a hard time believing 96GB of RAM just isn't cutting it anymore for what I do. Particularly when the problems soley arise in Vectorworks.

[Tom Klaber]

35 minutes ago, Wesley Burrows said:

I also seem to be seeing this more if there are several VW files open at the same time.   A lot of the same types of stuff happening as mentioned above by others.    I don't understand why this is.    When I deal with even larger amounts of high poly geometry in C4D, (I often replace geometry from VW exports with higher poly replacements for renders) and it goes all day without missing a beat.     I'm not modeling high rises or anything,   just live events.   I have a hard time believing 96GB of RAM just isn't cutting it anymore for what I do. Particularly when the problems soley arise in Vectorworks.

 

I'm slumming it with 32GB - I was thinking of upgrading - but if you have similar with 96GB - then sounds like the issue is more fundamental.