Chief & Computer Memory - Not responding

[bulmandesigns]

I've been using chief since X6. Why will chief never use all of my computer memory? At most it uses ten percent, then goes to not responding when dealing with high detailed layouts, refreshing plot line elevations, generating layout previews etc. Can anyone help me to get chief to use more memory? I've tried setting the process to use more in task manager, it does help a bit. Chief also only ever uses a small percentage of my CPU if I'm not rendering

I have a Ryzen 7 1700x 8 core CPU, 32GB of ram. Chief uses 1.3gb and 6% of my CPU max.

I wish we had these settings like we do number of cores used in a render,

[Renerabbitt]

2 minutes ago, bulmandesigns said:

I've been using chief since X6. Why will chief never use all of my computer memory? At most it uses ten percent, then goes to not responding when dealing with high detailed layouts, refreshing plot line elevations, generating layout previews etc. Can anyone help me to get chief to use more memory? I've tried setting the process to use more in task manager, it does help a bit. Chief also only ever uses a small percentage of my CPU if I'm not rendering

I have a Ryzen 7 1700x 8 core CPU, 32GB of ram. Chief uses 1.3gb and 6% of my CPU max.

I wish we had these settings like we do number of cores used in a render,

CA simply does not need to utilize that much RAM- you'd see better performance by upgrading read write speeds, i.e. an m.2 NVME.

Also your CPU clock speed is more important than number of cores for said issues.

 

Could always see more benefit from creating a backed up ram disk for library/archives/undo's or increase your page file for a HDD etc... probably see better performance than trying to force allocation of ram

[bulmandesigns]

10 minutes ago, Renerabbitt said:

CA simply does not need to utilize that much RAM- you'd see better performance by upgrading read write speeds, i.e. an m.2 NVME.

Also your CPU clock speed is more important than number of cores for said issues.

 

Could always see more benefit from creating a backed up ram disk for library/archives/undo's or increase your page file for a HDD etc... probably see better performance than trying to force allocation of ram

My CPU is a 3.4ghz. I use SSD's, my ram is DDR4. 

Do you ever experience this issues? comparing our CPU's you do have a larger cache. Are you suggesting I upgrade my solid state?

[Renerabbitt]

3 minutes ago, bulmandesigns said:

My CPU is a 3.4ghz. I use SSD's, my ram is DDR4. 

Do you ever experience this issues? comparing our CPU's you do have a larger cache. Are you suggesting I upgrade my solid state?

There could be more to your issues than hardware allocation...imported PDFs can drastically slow down your system as well as a ton of CAD blocks or high poly count objects ..maybe post a layout file that is causing an issue. 

NVME's drastically improve CA in my opinion...as well as everything else in windows.

I also use a ramdisk to , at the very least, store undos...I use it for much more than that

I personally do not use layout for anything other than a print application. ..my title block is in .plan, my layout remains blank until time of final print...previews are in plan only.

[bulmandesigns]

2 minutes ago, Renerabbitt said:

There could be more to your issues than hardware allocation...imported PDFs can drastically slow down your system as well as a ton of CAD blocks or high poly count objects ..maybe post a layout file that is causing an issue. 

NVME's drastically improve CA in my opinion...as well as everything else in windows.

I also use a ramdisk to , at the very least, store undos...I use it for much more than that

I personally do not use layout for anything other than a print application. ..my title block is in .plan, my layout remains blank until time of final print...previews are in plan only.

I'll definitely check out the NVME, even if I just reinstall chief onto it rather than windows. 

The layout in particular has a PDF on it that made me post, which I do know is the issue but I do have plans where when updating my plot line elevations it can cause some delays. I'll have a look around and see about uploading it. I usually add a bit of text on the layouts themselves but nothing dramatic.

I also don't have many 3D objects in my files such as furniture etc. But in sections views I can get program delays/slowness with moving cad elements etc. 

I've changed chief to have limited undos as at one point I thought it might be slowing the software down but might look into the ramdisk idea as well. thanks for your reply by the way, I appreciate it.

[Renerabbitt]

Just now, bulmandesigns said:

I'll definitely check out the NVME, even if I just reinstall chief onto it rather than windows. 

The layout in particular has a PDF on it that made me post, which I do know is the issue but I do have plans where when updating my plot line elevations it can cause some delays. I'll have a look around and see about uploading it. I usually add a bit of text on the layouts themselves but nothing dramatic.

I also don't have many 3D objects in my files such as furniture etc. But in sections views I can get program delays/slowness with moving cad elements etc. 

I've changed chief to have limited undos as at one point I thought it might be slowing the software down but might look into the ramdisk idea as well. thanks for your reply by the way, I appreciate it.

consider the NVME for operating system- it makes a HUGE difference

I also screen clip imported PDF' and save as .pngs, or use a software to reduce size...PDFs always cause slowdowns.

I don't have much experience moving items in sections so i can't speak on that

and certainly...cheers!

[TheKitchenAbode]

Looks to me as if you just have a very large plan. Your system specs are more than ample, decent CPU & lots of ram. What type of video card do you have? Keep in mind that many instructions in CA are single threaded so those extra cores don't really help very much. What version of CA are you using? Might want to post your plan so others can give it a try.

[bulmandesigns]

5 minutes ago, TheKitchenAbode said:

Looks to me as if you just have a very large plan. Your system specs are more than ample, decent CPU & lots of ram. What type of video card do you have? Keep in mind that many instructions in CA are single threaded so those extra cores don't really help very much. What version of CA are you using? Might want to post your plan so others can give it a try.

I've got a 4gb gtx 1080, using x11. As I mentioned above I'll upload a plan when I have a chance. I never usually experience slowness in plan view, but cross sections with cad elements. 

 

[HumbleChief]

Chief has never really published any docs on how to speed up Chief's performance other than RayTracing uses the CPU. Is more memory good? How much? Why? Why not? Clock speed is better? Probably but Chief never really said so. Cores? No one really knows, but those who know computers guess, which we all appreciate so there's no really no way to know what will get you what kind of performance gains with Chief. 

 

I've got an old but decent computer that will slow to a crawl with a large model? Upgraded both CPU's. No change. Upgraded the Graphics card. No change. Gave up spending money because there was simply no definitive place to look. Sure I could add drives and then more mem and hope for the best but it can be a crap shoot.

 

Of course there are experts here that will give good advice that should not be ignored and you will probably get real close to Chief's best performance but there's never any good reason not to equip your computer with the best and fastest components you can afford....

[TheKitchenAbode]

1 minute ago, bulmandesigns said:

I've got a 4gb gtx 1080, using x11. As I mentioned above I'll upload a plan when I have a chance. I never usually experience slowness in plan view, but cross sections with cad elements. 

 

 Vid card is good so I really suspect it's something to do with your plan.

[Kbird1]

2 hours ago, bulmandesigns said:

I've got a 4gb gtx 1080,

 

You sure ? tried GPUz yet ?  ......most 1080 have 8GB ...I thought..... either way you should be good with 4GB ( CA Render Tab should show you too but it didn't always read all video Cards correctly eg my 4GB 970 GTX was seen as 3GB

 

Cross Sections and CAD are all Lines , sometimes thousands of them depending on the Patterns ( turn them off ) which can really slow things down in CA

[bulmandesigns]

15 hours ago, Renerabbitt said:

CA simply does not need to utilize that much RAM- you'd see better performance by upgrading read write speeds, i.e. an m.2 NVME.

Also your CPU clock speed is more important than number of cores for said issues.

 

Could always see more benefit from creating a backed up ram disk for library/archives/undo's or increase your page file for a HDD etc... probably see better performance than trying to force allocation of ram

 

I too felt weird typing that. It's 8gb. Apparently Speccy can only read up to 4gb graphics cards and thats what I had up at the moment.

What do you do for your sections then? I add CAD elements, text etc, and like to send it to layout using plot lines. Do you recommend I use live view?
 

[Kbird1]

2 hours ago, bulmandesigns said:

 

I too felt weird typing that. It's 8gb. Apparently Speccy can only read up to 4gb graphics cards and thats what I had up at the moment.

What do you do for your sections then? I add CAD elements, text etc, and like to send it to layout using plot lines. Do you recommend I use live view?
 

 

I prefer Plot Lines myself and do as much as possible "In Plan" before going to Layout....

 

M.

[Ridge_Runner]

9 hours ago, Kbird1 said:

I prefer Plot Lines myself and do as much as possible "In Plan" before going to Layout....

Me too; done it that way for years. However, Renerabbit has a workflow that intrigues me that he did a video on recently. He "lost me" real quick and this old, tired brain probably won't change - too close to retirement, I hope!

[MoeGia]

I often create a new layout for the working drawing phase by copying the layout and deleting the live views.  I always use 'update on demand' but find some files are much too slow with the views in the layout.  I use a PDF editor to compile the two PDFs in the end.  

 

I can't figure out what causes some layout files to be so slow, but removing the 3D views seems to help.

[BrownTiger]

ChiefArchitect uses what it needs. Windows 10 uses paged memory (can be swapped to physical drive) and non-paged can not.

Non-paged memory is reserved for the drivers. The memory (paged) that CA allocated could be in allocated or committed state.

Software also loads external libraries like DLLs. Typically done with LoadLibrary* APIs. Since executable code segments

do not change, and you do not need to load the entire executable and every single library to run the code

Windows loads what you need and maps regions for every code segment to a file (see MapViewOfFile ) for each DLL and EXE.

 

If a process to load every single library, not only it will be very slow to start, wasteful, inefficient.

 

CA also uses a ton of third party libraries, almost none of those multi-task/thread. PDF can not  imho parallelized.

So really what you see is what you get. 

 

 

[bulmandesigns]

1 hour ago, BrownTiger said:

ChiefArchitect uses what it needs. Windows 10 uses paged memory (can be swapped to physical drive) and non-paged can not.

Non-paged memory is reserved for the drivers. The memory (paged) that CA allocated could be in allocated or committed state.

Software also loads external libraries like DLLs. Typically done with LoadLibrary* APIs. Since executable code segments

do not change, and you do not need to load the entire executable and every single library to run the code

Windows loads what you need and maps regions for every code segment to a file (see MapViewOfFile ) for each DLL and EXE.

 

If a process to load every single library, not only it will be very slow to start, wasteful, inefficient.

 

CA also uses a ton of third party libraries, almost none of those multi-task/thread. PDF can not  imho parallelized.

So really what you see is what you get. 

 

 

Based on the last sentence, really what Chief needs if you aren't rendering is just one single super fast thread on your CPU then, to make those processes and layouts work more efficiently? 

[TheKitchenAbode]

9 minutes ago, bulmandesigns said:

just one single super fast thread on your CPU then, to make those processes and layouts work more efficiently? 

 

Not sure there is such a thing as a single super fast thread. It's the reality that a number of operations are single threaded and as such they are unable to take advantage of multi-core processing. Unfortunately it's not feasible to write all code to be multi-core efficient, many computations must be resolved in a series like manner, you need the result of the first equation before you can resolve the second equation. To take advantage of multi-core processing each equation needs to be independent of the other, one core resolves equation 1 while another core resolves equation 2. When it comes to these single threaded operations you are essentially at the mercy of your CPU's processing frequency, though this has improved over the last few years, increasing from high 3's to upper 4's low 5's, I don't anticipate much further improvement as cooling becomes a major issue as frequency increases.