Slow perfomance

Hi,
 
I’ve got a question my company recently sell a Hp XW4400 Professional Workstation to a client that uses your application Stardraw Lighting 2D 2007. They bought the new PC because they found the old pc was al little bit slow it was slow when they open a drawing,  when they create a new layer and when they disable and enable a layer. now with the new pc they have the same problems. The drawings (+/- 10 MB file) take about 1 minute to open. First I thought it was a network speed problem but when I copied the file to the local hard drive it didn’t get faster. I disabled the virus scanner and some other tools but no go. When I look in the task list (when I open the drawing) and look at the performance of the CPU I see that it doesn’t come above the 50% !! stardraw.exe uses 50 % of de CPU and there is still 50 % CPU free why doesn’t is take more cpu ?
Can you help me?
Btw, Does it help if the video card has 1 GHz of memory? does stardraw uses the video memory often?

the System specs are:
 
HP XW4400
2GB memory
Intel Duo Core 2 Ghz
Windows XP Sp2
ATI  X1950 -  256 DDR3 memory
 
old system specs:
PIV 2,8 GHz
1 GB memory
Nvidia 512 G7200 LE
 
thanks,
 
grtz
Jordi

If the size of the file is greater than 10MB, then I'm not surprised that it can take up to a minute to load up. I would look at why the file is so large. Stardraw files are very, very efficient and are compressed and in AutoCAD this file would be nearly 100MB in size.

As for using 50% of the CPU, this is because you have a Dual Core 2 Processor. This effectively has 2 processors in it. The loading of a file in Stardraw is done in one thread and will take one of those processors. The 50% CPU usage you are seeing is the overall CPU usage, including the other processor.

David Snipp
Stardraw.com Ltd

ok thnx David for your reply, I will tell the customer to check the file, have you got an tips to

optimise a Big file (no not CTRL + A then Delete everything :-) hehe just kidding) I’m just not

familiar how stardraw Works.

Is there an other option for increasing the performance, does a better video card, processor or memory increase anything?



thnx

Jordi

He has probably imported this from a very large AutoCAD drawing.

I suspect that the file has tens of thousands of lines in it that are not really used or important.

He just needs to go through the drawing and remove what he doesn't need.

David Snipp
Stardraw.com Ltd

David,

ok that’s clear he needs to cleanup the drawing and if I understand it correctly stardraw can only use 1 processor of a dual core processor, correct? but..

Will there be a patch for stardraw so it can also take advance of the second processor?



What if there can’t be cleaned (customer is searching but had no luck deleting anything from the drawing, he needs it all) and the customer still want to get stardraw work faster with that drawing, what can you advice for hardware specs (the best around).



thnx

Jordi

The loading of a file from disk is a serial, synchronous task and it would be a huge amount of work to get this one task to be multi-threaded for very little gain. The advantage of 2 processors is that while it is loading from disk, your machine can get on and do other things, like checking email, posting to forums etc. etc.

The biggest single thing that will make a difference to the performance of Stardraw opening large files is extra memory. If you are running XP, then you should have more than 512MB RAM. If you are running Vista, then increase this to at least 1GB RAM

If your customer still can't get his file smaller, please feel free to post us a link to the file where we can have a look at it and see if we can figure out where the size is coming from.

David Snipp
Stardraw.com Ltd

Hi David,



When the loading of the drawing is in progress he can’t check his mail and when the drawing is loaded and he want to turn on/off some layers settings, like print, report (disable or enable checkboxes in the layer screen), change a name of the layer or create a new layer then the system doesn’t respond, he can’t select outlook or an other application. When I view the task manger process it is 50 % and nothing more. It doesn’t use the other free cpu space?

The system has 2 GB of memory and that would be enough.

I will send a link with the file throught the email.



thnx

Jordi

I don't understand why they can't select another application in XP while the first application is busy. This is exactly what XP has been designed to do and it doesn't matter what the application is.

Again, we'll have a look at the file and try to see what is going on.

David Snipp
Stardraw.com Ltd

We've now had a good lok at the file and, as expected, this was a large AutoCAD file imported into Stardraw.

The file has nearly 600,000 entities such as lines, circles, text etc. etc. on 180 Layers.

Naturally, this is going to take a while to load (about a minute on my machine) and to redraw (2 seconds on my machine). It also only takes about 15 seconds to save the file.

While working on the document, I would strongly recommend turning off the layers that you don't need and this will make redrawing a lot, lot quicker.

Also, as the file is so large, I would change the AutoSave settings as the default is that it will save a copy of the file every 5 minutes and if this takes a while, then this could be very annoying. You can change this from Tools->Preferences->Auto Save...

Hope this helps.

David Snipp
Stardraw.com Ltd