Slowness on my Computer

[shanecarman]

Hello,

 

My Chief Architect program is very slow on large plans. I have no issue on small plans. I thought upgrading my ram to 64gb and installing a 1tb hard drive would help but it has not. The Chief Architect program was installed on the main PC SSD and was slow. I installed a 1TB SSD in addition to the original 256 GB SSD. The speed of the program has not changed since moving it over or the RAM upgrades. The PC I have was custom built by a company. I personally am not that knowledgable about hardware but I know it's a pretty great PC. Not yet a year old.

It often takes over three to five minutes to undo an action or save files on the large plan. Any ideas? My friend suggested changing the paging file speed but I am unsure how to do this or if it will make a difference. Would the slowness be a limitation of the program or my computer? I have attached screenshots of my computer specs. I wrote to tech support and they said the plan is just too large.  I always assumed slowness is due to my computer and couldn't be a limitation of the software.  Is that incorrect?  I can upload a link to the plan if desired but it is quite large.

Thank you for your help!!

 

 

 

 

 

[shanecarman]

1 minute ago, Griffin said:

A larger drive might not help, but an SSD drive certainly will.  SSD are 10-20 times faster than a spinning drive.  I use a small 256MB Samsung 960 EVO M.2 drive for my operating system and then dual SSD drives in a Windows Storage System.  Easy to configure, lighting fast, and redundant.

 

 

Thanks for the message.  I moved the program to my SSD 1tb Samsung when I recently purchased the SSD.  Hasn't seemed to make a difference yet.  My operating system is still on the original, 256GB drive.

[shanecarman]

The Samsung SSD 850 pro 1TB that I listed in the picture is the new hard drive that I moved all my Chief Files to.

[Griffin]

Yes, I did not read your post carefully.  You might install CrystalMark software and measure your drive performance.  I'd be interested to see what sort of numbers you are getting on each drive.

 

http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskMark/index-e.html

 

I used the 2.7M Installer version

[Richard_Morrison]

What version are you on? (Please add to your signature.) How large is the actual file? Chief has always had a point where a plan gets too large and you need to start finding ways to simplify 3D representations, like replacing fancy balusters with square ones, getting rid of exploded fills, etc., although models can be much larger now than in the past. You may find that X9 will help enormously with speed, since that is something they've been working on.  A five minute undo would drive me nuts. Another thing to look at are the number of CAD items you've got. CAD intensive files used to be very, very slow, and you might need to move these items to a separate file. This improved in X7 or X8.

[DRAWZILLA]

Yep a very large plan will do it. You may just have to live with it for this one.. You can turn off things until you are ready to print, like large amounts of molding and round railings

[DRAWZILLA]

Yep a very large plan will do it. You may just have to live with it for this one.. You can turn off things until you are ready to print, like large amounts of molding and round railings

[shanecarman]

30 minutes ago, Griffin said:

Yes, I did not read your post carefully.  You might install CrystalMark software and measure your drive performance.  I'd be interested to see what sort of numbers you are getting on each drive.

 

http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskMark/index-e.html

 

I used the 2.7M Installer version

Thanks for the program tip.  I have attached screenshots of both hard drives.  The first picture, the one to the left, is the 1TB new drive Chief is installed on.  The second one contains the OS system.  Hope I ran the test right.

[shanecarman]

19 minutes ago, DRAWZILLA said:

Yep a very large plan will do it. You may just have to live with it for this one.. You can turn off things until you are ready to print, like large amounts of molding and round railings

Thanks for the advice.  I am mainly using Chief to import the building into Lumion.  I have no speed issues on that software but it just takes forever to make the building changes in Chief before importing and takes several hours to export to a DAE file.  Thanks again.

[Griffin]

 

Your numbers generally look good, but you are taking a hit on larger file read and writes.  That's the 4K block test on the bottom.  Are you using Win10 disk compression - that would slow you down.

 

[Griffin]

You might go through the checklist here:

 

https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00521/troubleshooting-slowness-in-chief-architect-plans.html

[shanecarman]

30 minutes ago, Richard_Morrison said:

What version are you on? (Please add to your signature.) How large is the actual file? Chief has always had a point where a plan gets too large and you need to start finding ways to simplify 3D representations, like replacing fancy balusters with square ones, getting rid of exploded fills, etc., although models can be much larger now than in the past. You may find that X9 will help enormously with speed, since that is something they've been working on.  A five minute undo would drive me nuts. Another thing to look at are the number of CAD items you've got. CAD intensive files used to be very, very slow, and you might need to move these items to a separate file. This improved in X7 or X8.

Sorry for not sharing that.  I have X8.  The file is 147MB.  Most of the plan is empty as far as rooms go, just have walls, flooring, etc.  The 120 room lodge has furnished kids clubs, lobby, decks, one hotel room is furnished, and a bar.  It is 144,109 SF in total.  There are two sets of stair cases, over 120 windows, etc.  Certainly would be much more furnished in real life but I understand it wouldn't make sense to do that in Chief.  Any idea when X9 comes out?  Thank you for your time!

[shanecarman]

8 minutes ago, Griffin said:

 

Your numbers generally look good, but you are taking a hit on larger file read and writes.  That's the 4K block test on the bottom.  Are you using Win10 disk compression - that would slow you down.

 

I don't think I am using any compression program.

[Griffin]

It is possible to get much higher large block write numbers if you want to invest the time. This guy is running 12 times faster on benchmark I/O.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Chopsaw]

I would not mind taking a look at your plan file if you can upload it to a cloud service and post the link or try to put it in a zip file and see if it is 25 MB or less to post directly on the forum.   I looked at a plan file for a friend in a similar situation and it choked my computer down to a slow speed but was only using about 20-25% of my computers resources.  I have talked to tech support about this situation and they are looking for plan files that cause problems like this.  Your processor may be holding you back a little but there should not be any issue with your RAM or SSD.  The other trick that I have seen work before is to do a "save as" with the file and it may clean out any unnecessary stuff.

[Chopsaw]

While you are watching that little blue circle go around and around pull up Windows 10 Task manager or Resource Monitor and it will give you a real time readout of your CPU and Memory utilization.  I suspect that this will not be running at 100%.  If you run a high quality ray trace that will give you a good comparison for performance vs. the plan file.

[shanecarman]

21 minutes ago, Chopsaw said:

I would not mind taking a look at your plan file if you can upload it to a cloud service and post the link or try to put it in a zip file and see if it is 25 MB or less to post directly on the forum.   I looked at a plan file for a friend in a similar situation and it choked my computer down to a slow speed but was only using about 20-25% of my computers resources.  I have talked to tech support about this situation and they are looking for plan files that cause problems like this.  Your processor may be holding you back a little but there should not be any issue with your RAM or SSD.

Here is the file.  Thank you so much!  https://www.dropbox.com/s/mtekzio3km0yeu9/Lodge.zip?dl=0

[DRAWZILLA]

Usually X9 officially releases around Feb.(never know for sure) but the final public Beta will be real soon, if you have X8, and SSA and beware, you can't go back once a plan is brought forward into X9 so copy the plan or layout

[shanecarman]

3 minutes ago, Chopsaw said:

While you are watching that little blue circle go around and around pull up Windows 10 Task manager or Resource Monitor and it will give you a real time readout of your CPU and Memory utilization.  I suspect that this will not be running at 100%.  If you run a high quality ray trace that will give you a good comparison for performance vs. the plan file.

Here it is.  I am a little confused by what Raytrace is.  Thanks again.

[shanecarman]

2 minutes ago, DRAWZILLA said:

Usually X9 officially releases around Feb.(never know for sure) but the final public Beta will be real soon, if you have X8, and SSA and beware, you can't go back once a plan is brought forward into X9 so copy the plan or layout

Thanks for the advice!

[shanecarman]

30 minutes ago, Griffin said:

It is possible to get much higher numbers if you want to invest the time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

For some reason the rapid mode button is not selectable on my computer.  The button 'enable' is dimmed and not selectable.  Any advice?  Thank you!

[Chopsaw]

4 minutes ago, shanecarman said:

Here it is.  I am a little confused by what Raytrace is.  Thanks again.

 

And is that live while Chief is non responsive?      Because if it is there is a major problem with 0% CPU usage.

[shanecarman]

Just now, Chopsaw said:

 

And is that live while Chief is non responsive?      Because if it is there is a major problem with 0% CPU usage.

Chief is running during that.  It always runs in the sense that it isn't crashing.  Just extremely slow.  It freezes while saving, making any change to items in the plan, moving walls, etc but never crashes, just takes forever.

[Alaskan_Son]

Here are my comments for whatever they're worth (in no particular order)...

1.   I tried your plan out on my desktop.  Very slow for me as well.  Working in plan view not bad (only a few seconds lag time for undo/redo operations) but working in 3D it was taking between a minute and a minute and a half for the same operations. 
2.   I don't see any reason why your storage space would come into play at all.  That should never have any affect on your speed. 
3. The SSD should make a difference...not because of the increased storage but because of the technology...data access is just much faster with an SSD. 
4.   I suspect the reason for the slowness may have more to do with your video card than anything else you've mentioned.  Part of the slowness on my end might be my RAM although I doubt it (I was getting low memory warnings with your plan open) but you seem to have plenty of that. 
5. I don't think the CPU usage displaying as zero is a big deal.  Mine looks like that all the time when Chief is sitting idle.  It will jump up when you're actually doing something but usually when you're looking at the task manager you've stopped doing anything.  Trying moving your mouse around the screen on Chief wile task manager is visible or try zooming in and out on a 3D view and see what that number does.
6. While creating a 3D view of your plan my CPU usage jumped up to 100% for a few seconds, dropped back down to around 30%, jumped back up to 100%, dropped back down, jumped back up etc.  I think its bouncing back and forth between the CPU and the video card during those operations.

 

At the end of the day, I'm betting it's either:

 

A.  Your CPU and maybe one of it's settings (the plan is just huge so there may not be much you can do)

B.  Your video card.

 

Probably both actually.

 

What are your video card specs?  Remember that the video card does much of the heavy lifting when it comes to normal 3D views.

[Chopsaw]

Ok I got your plan loaded and it is HUGE and running fairly slow on my machine.  You can likely speed things up quite a bit by turning things off that you are not using at the time.  Anything like symbols of furnishings and such can have their layers turned off as soon as you have them situated.  I don't have time right now to comb over the whole plan but it seems similar to the last one I looked at with the same issues.  My Task manager readings are static at about 24% for memory and 15 -25 % for CPU. I will get back to you after dinner. Anything with a high surface count you should try to turn off.  My GPU load is about 27% in Perspective Full Overview and 1-2% in plan view.