Smn842

Windows can utilise spare ram for disk caching so utilisation doesn't always give the full performance picture, however at 50% I doubt you will see any difference and the money spent elsewhere could be more beneficial such as NVMe SSD etc if not already in use. The only other potential benefit for Chief would be a RAM drive for undo storage, although I find some plans benefit more from this versus NVMe SSD than others. Some plans appear more CPU limited cresting the undo file. I use Chief on PCs running 16, 32 and 64GB mostly due use of other software for virtual machines and software development. Generally I find RAM is an area where being short has a huge impact due to paging to disk, but otherwise adding more makes little difference.

There is now a 'Floors and Rooms' section in default settings so perhaps that's an older video not updated for newer releases:

I've not had to pay for it myself so no idea on how the cost stacks up, but I used Zoom at a couple of companies I've worked for and it did everything required and can be used with a browser of dedicated application. The user interface and tools worked well and coped with the myriad of screen sizes and switching to projectors or different monitors without issue. It also has a lot of other features for annotation and white boarding but I didn't use those much.

If you prefer a GUI to do the same, I would recommend this shell extension http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/linkshellextension.html and there are some others that do the same. It's then just right click on the source folder and select 'Pick Link Source' and then on the target folder right click and "Drop as junction" or symbolic link (there is a difference but for this purpose the result is similar although the latter will prompt for elevation)

I have PCs with a mix of SATA HDDs, SATA SSDs and NVMe SSDs (using motherboard connectors or via PCIe add on cards) If your planned motherboard doesn't have fittings on it directly (odd these days), then a $25 - $35 PCIe card will provide the same. It's only very old motherboards where BIOS support may be an issue.

Given the rest of your spec a firm yes! On my current PC I moved to an NVMe SSD for boot/programs and regular SATA SSD for the 4TB of slower storage. The only place I used HDD these days is on my home servers for CCTV (where HDD is king due to the huge writes) and my backups due to the storage required (10TB+).

That's a good spec, the only thing I would check is to ensure the SSD is NVMe and not SATA as that makes a big difference to SSD performance.

Do you mean the cupola that's on floor level 1, but set to roof height? That shows on the appropriate level of plan view, unless you mean something else?

I use Chief but am not a typical user as I am just an amateur using it to plan the remodelling of my home, however I still decided the cost was worth it for various reasons. My day job is working in software and there are many software applications that are in the several thousand or more USD price range and used all over the world. Just one development tool I use is over $4000 USD and in total I have probably three times that invested in the software I use. The reason that some software costs so much more than others is primarily down to how specialised it is (i.e.is it likely to have a few thousand users or vastly more) and how complex it is to develop and maintain. Developing software is incredibly time consuming and hence costly and that has to be recouped and profit made. I've worked on applications that have hundreds of developer years worth of development time in them and that's a huge cost. In the case of CA, they can sell a cut down version of Chief as a home product hence the low cost of the Home Designer products. That may give them extra revenue and/or a way to get people to upgrade to the professional level products (as in my case).

The various limitations with windows are a real pain, especially for the construction styles we have in Europe. It's impossible to get any where near a correct representations of windows and doors (worse for doors due to no inset control). I wanted to model some options for replacement windows and doors and for the few I could use Chief's windows/doors I still had to fill gaps over cavities and make sills separately and at worst had to make custom symbols. Mulling and un-mulling not leaving the windows the same as before also drives me mad. I submitted a detailed suggestion with examples for my issues a year or two ago so I just wait in hope at each new release.

I have a different experience: I had to have intraocular lens implants due to other eye surgery and its not been a great experience. I avoided multifocal/trifocal/extended depth of focus IOLs due to the loss contrast which is inevitable (same with multifocal contact lenses) and also to reduce the risk of glare and visual effects at night. Sadly, although I have excellent daytime vision when using my glasses or contacts (sharper than I can ever remember) the night time effects are annoying with lots of star bursts and halos around light sources. IOLs can lead to subsequent posterior capsular opacification (sometimes known as secondary cataract) which needs lasering and that can leave debris floating in the vitreous of the eye which is annoying and also more visual effects due to lens pitting. If someone has cataracts or a difficult to correct prescription then there's no choice, but if you check out the two major forums for eye conditions you'll find problems are common. I think its risky unless needed although for some it gives excellent results with mutifocal/extended depth of field IOLs.

I've tried lots of sizes from 3 x 27" to a 43" and also several curved screens. I've come to the conclusion that in addition to the type of use, a lot depends on your vision and especially those of us that are old enough to be presbyopic. As commented above, progressive glasses are not great for screen use and I found the 43" hard work looking around all corners as the focal distance required changes a fair bit. I wear multifocal contact lenses some days and and even though they don't require moving of the head like progressive glasses they still require the brain to adjust which is tiresome even though it happens in a fraction of a second. In comparison using 3 x 27" to 30" screens is much easier for me if the screens are set in an arc as the distance is more consistent. Ideally I would like a very wide, say 50" but reasonable height curved screen but there aren't any.

If that's not zipped you should be okay with if zipped as plans usually compress to around a third of the original size.

When tracking down what makes up the overall surface count I also find using a 3D view and using the total surface shown in the middle of the status bar useful. I then toggle various layers on and off to narrow down troublesome symbols before checking symbol by symbol. I am now more careful when importing symbols but I originally imported a lot of symbols for European fittings and fixtures and its easy for the surface counts to add up.

The end user license agreement in the install (and online here) only permits transfer once approved by Chief Architect after completing the required transfer documents and paying the fee.

Lew is correct. That setting is for holding a lock on the plan file while it is open in Chief which prevents other copies of Chief or other applications from modifying/deleting it. This is the norm for most applications, but I expect the option is there for any rare support issues that arise from holding a file handle on the plan file (possibly some remote file services, poor network connections etc). Even if an application crashes and so skips its normal file closing sequence the operating system will remove such files handles/locks.

You have posted the same question several times and as Windows 10 has the required support for Arabic this is an issue you really need to discuss with Chief Architect support.

It does clean up the files so now problem there. I am an software performance and scaleability engineer for a couple of global companies so do a lot of analysis on such issues down to low level hardware (local drives, bus/network speed, SANs etc) and never said 50 extra files makes a difference. I have 635K files on my boot NVMe SSD drive but use a specific NVMe for temp files/undo for various applications anyway. The core issue here is Chief writes undo files that are too large, too frequently. It's probably crept up on them over the years with larger more complex plans with more detailed symbols so hopefully our various grumbles will get some attention to the core issue.

I agree generating such complex and large undo files is CPU intensive, but with a large enough plan and the double size undo files then disk I/O becomes a major factor in my test. Switching between a fast NVMe SSD and a good HD for undo was very noticeable and painful with 130MB - 200MB undo files (twice plan size). Without profiling in more detail it feels like there isn't too much CPU time streaming out the undo file (with my few of amateur plans at least) but certainly a lot restoring a model which is logical. I don't mind a bit of slowness undoing, but not the impact for every operation and the amount of disk space required is also excessive. Ultimately CA need to reduce the undo file size which reduces all overhead, lets hope they look at this for the next release.

If you have a 3D view open then yes that's adds more time, but for large plans the file operation can be much slower than the redraw (unless in PBR mode). When using a RAM disk this can be used for Chief undo only to avoid the issues you mention. The 3D speed remind me of another performance issue which I've reported which is that having a 2D and 3D view of the same plan on the same level causes a slow down when moving in 3D. The cause appears to be the 2D plan regenerating/drawing for every camera move whether the camera symbol is shown or not. This is very noticeable with a 3D mouse due to the ease of movement and the workaround is to move the camera to another floor and then move it in 3D back to the applicable floor so the plan considers it on another floor. As a quick fix am sure CA could either make the camera symbol and overlay to avoid this or even just throttle 2D updates (say once per second) when moving in 3D. My day job is software performance and scalability so please excuse all the detail

I have also been using a specific folder for Chief undo to an NVMe SSD and as @Kbird1 said its easy enough to create a folder on a RAM disk at boot even if the RAM disk software itself doesn't provide the facility. The last time I reviewed RAM disks some had options and hooks to prepare and/or persist certain files around boots, but in this case a simple command (batch) script can create a directory for Chief on each boot. As I work in software I decided to monitor the behaviour of Chief's undo with appropriate tools during a couple of hours work and it is indeed very heavyweight. I have developed undo/redo for complex applications with multiple users and highly linked data so I am aware of the challenges, but even so some things in Chief are surprising. During that session Chief wrote more data to my SSD than anything else and that includes Chrome with loads of tabs (notorious for its cache), Norton and various other development tools and running applications including a virtual machine. From that session I noted: It appears that a few operations such as object moves have been optimised to store a relatively small undo file (2 - 10MB). Some operations are obviously trivial to reverse whereas others will require data lost by the change so perhaps this was the undo optimisations mentioned in X9 or X10 (can't remember which). Most operations trigger the storing of an undo file roughly double the size of plan file as noted in the OP. The large undo files are stored even when clicking OK to a dialog with no changes. There are many operations that trigger the large undo file but appear easy to reverse such a toggling layer visibility triggering the larger undo file, changing a setting in defaults etc. The binary contents of the undo files are easy to compress and/or reduce size during writing (I've not checked into whether these contain any SQLite tables frequently used by Chief or just another representation of the plan) I generated 3.5GB of undo files from a 65MB plan file using the default 50 levels of undo so I wouldn't want to work on monster plan! I tried a short session using a medium speed hard disk for undo instead of my fast NVMe and it was so painful I gave up. I've always used NVMe SSDs with Chief and I had no idea it could be this slow. As a software developer I do appreciate some things are not as easy as they seem and a much more efficient undo/redo may impact Chief's whole internal storage model. However there appear to be some potential ways to improve speed of the current system without major work, e.g.: Use an internal memory cache with a user configurable size (so in effect an internal RAM disk) and when push the oldest undo files to disk. Increase the number of operations that don't need to store the large undo file. It seems terrible that a bit of layer visibility causes that large file per layer toggle (unless you're really quick). Run the data through a fast low overhead compression (LZ4 or similar) before storage. There's always a trade off between CPU and disk speed especially against NVMe SSDs but compression can be done in a background thread or threads and only used when beneficial. As a quick test a single thread LZ4 ran at 700MB/s on on core on my oldest dev PC and reduced the file to 40% of the original. Good NVMe SSDs can manage 2000+MB/s write speed but even single threaded this would be useful for caching in RAM to greatly increase storage and on disk still be better for most users. Some of the applications I've written test disk write speed to ascertain whether to use compression or not as applicable. Some undo files as noted in the OP, are very similar. It may be viable to use a differential algorithm to only store differences between a sequence of similar undo files but would need code to ensure the base undo is retained or rolled forward as needed. I have run on way more than intended and have some other work to do now . Suffice to say the current undo/redo system appears to need major improvement but I hope we can get some quick fix improvements while we wait.

I am a software developer as well as Chief user and did some analysis on file activity a while back, initially for library search performance issues. I saw the same heavy writes for undo, but given I never have much of a delay for undo (my plans are normally 75 - 100MB) I just moved the temporary and undo folders to a dedicated small but very fast SSD I use for many applications that write too frequently affecting performance. I have enough memory for a RAM drive and used to use a commercial one with persistence options, but with the reasonable cot of small fast SSDs its no longer the best option for me. There are many major applications that perform too much file I/O (Chrome, Norton, Office) and also often overlook that anti-virus applications can scan some of these files on every write, so Chief is not alone here. I do think its unfair to suggest CA developers learn about linked lists as Chief is a complex application and clearly their developers have skills, but even the best companies don't always prioritise certain issues or realise the real world impact. I specialise in highly scaleable web applications and find such issues all the time. There are many other areas of Chief where it appears some profiling and general performance analysis is in order, the needless full 2D redraw discussed in another thread recently and some far from sub optimal file usages around the library for a start. I suggest you make a post in the suggestions section about this, or raise a ticket.

The last few releases have been in February so a while yet, but quite likely within the 12 month SSA.

Yes it still does the same for me no matter how I hide the camera from the 2D plan. I've just got into the habit of moving the 3D view to a different floor level to avoid the issue.

Do you have the 2D plan visible in another window with the camera on the same level as the 3D view? If so then this may well be the issue I reported several times over the last couple of years, first when I purchased HD Pro and then again after upgrading to Chief Architect Premier. I noticed that whether or not the camera symbol is visible in the 2D plan, if both the 3D and 2D views are on the same level then the 3D view speed is greatly impacted as it appears for every movement the 2D plan is being recalculated and/or redrawn. The solution is to move the camera up or down a level or hold the mouse down in the 3D window which stops updates in the 2D plan. Before X10 that had the disadvantage of turning off lights but now with the higher light limit that's not an issue. Perhaps I should report again, but I posted it in the Home Designer suggestions forum here and the second time after buying Chief via email and heard nothing back.