Hey Team, 

I have a fairly large project, that needs to get much larger before I'm complete. However I am very worried about the capacity of Stardraw to cope with a growing system with many items, cables and tabs. 

The frustrating 'I'm Busy Mouse Circle' looks to appear very often and after the most basic of tasks, every minute or so, meaning I have to pause what I am doing for 5-15 seconds whilst i wait for it to stop thinking.

I have already decided it will not be capable of taking the whole project which means my cable schedule, equipment list etc is going to need manual creation as I shall have to have multiple stardraw files to service this?

Is this normal? or is there perhaps an issue? I would prefer to house my entire system design in the single file.

Thanks

Alan

Hi Alan,

Could you email the project file to techsupport@stardraw.com so that we can try to reproduce what you are seeing?  (All supplied data will be treated with absolute confidentiality.)  Also it would be helpful if you could describe the sort of actions you're performing, and the drawing tab(s) in which you're working, when you see the 'Working' spinner frequently.  

Often the spinner will appear during AutoSave, which is a disaster recovery system that creates a backup file in case the application exits unexpectedly or the computer shuts down or otherwise fails catastrophically.  AutoSave is not required if you save regularly - which is recommended good practice in any application - and it only persists a backup in cases of disastrous failure, so simply by turning AutoSave off in Tools | Personalization | Settings you may find that the phenomenon disappears.

For the record Stardraw Design 7.3 is designed to support projects of any size and, being a 64-bit application, can access all available RAM on your system.  However, if, for example, your project contains a lot of very large imported third party files (e.g. imported DWGs or PDFs that contain hundreds of thousands of objects, or many large images) then operations that involve processing very large numbers of things e.g. iterative processes that might have to work through millions of calculations per action, will take longer than operations on native Stardraw data which is optimized for performance.

I hope this is helpful and look forward to receiving your project file for analysis.

Kind regards,
Rob Robinson
Stardraw.com

+x

 

Rob Robinson - 4/21/2020 7:31:43 AM

Hi Alan,

Could you email the project file to techsupport@stardraw.com so that we can try to reproduce what you are seeing?  (All supplied data will be treated with absolute confidentiality.)  Also it would be helpful if you could describe the sort of actions you're performing, and the drawing tab(s) in which you're working, when you see the 'Working' spinner frequently.  

Often the spinner will appear during AutoSave, which is a disaster recovery system that creates a backup file in case the application exits unexpectedly or the computer shuts down or otherwise fails catastrophically.  AutoSave is not required if you save regularly - which is recommended good practice in any application - and it only persists a backup in cases of disastrous failure, so simply by turning AutoSave off in Tools | Personalization | Settings you may find that the phenomenon disappears.

For the record Stardraw Design 7.3 is designed to support projects of any size and, being a 64-bit application, can access all available RAM on your system.  However, if, for example, your project contains a lot of very large imported third party files (e.g. imported DWGs or PDFs that contain hundreds of thousands of objects, or many large images) then operations that involve processing very large numbers of things e.g. iterative processes that might have to work through millions of calculations per action, will take longer than operations on native Stardraw data which is optimized for performance.

I hope this is helpful and look forward to receiving your project file for analysis.

Thanks Rob,

Immediate thoughts are that Autosave was the culprit and that using SD for a short while now and all appears a lot happier. Any benefit to sending a file through regardless? if not I shall continue to monitor and email if the problem is still present.

Cheers

Alan

Hi Alan,

If there don't appear to be any issues then it's not necessary to send the project file over.  Having said that it's always interesting for us to see live projects from the field, to understand how people are actually working with Stardraw Design 7.3, and sometimes we can spot potential snags or advise on good practice.

One other thought about performance: as you know, Stardraw Design 7.3 supports Undo/Redo back to the start of the session or the most recent Save.  To be able to Undo something it must keep a record of all the actions you perform and this is stored in what is known as the Undo/Redo buffer.  The longer you work without saving, and the more actions you do on more objects, the larger the Undo/Redo buffer gets, and this can impact performance because, of course, that buffer has to be stored somewhere.

Therefore, if you work on a large project, doing lots of things to lots of objects, for a long time, without saving, then things might slow up as the buffer gets bigger and bigger.  The solution, which is simply good practice in any application, is to Save regularly: this clears the Undo/Redo buffer, freeing up system resources.

It's also a good idea to close the application when you know you're not going to use it for a while, and - again, just good IT practice - restart your computer from time to time (i.e. don't leave it running for days and days at a time).

I hope this is useful information




Kind regards,
Rob Robinson
Stardraw.com