Chief Architect and PC health

[Hammer7]

Good morning,

 

I'm looking for a Chief user on PC that I could speak with about hard drive configuration for optimal performance.  Some of my resent larger files have been really bogging down my PC performance and looking to find someone that could help me reorganize and speed things up?  If there is a Pro out there that someone has worked with before I would appreciate that contact.  

[Doug_N]

My suggestion is to replace the hard drive with a large SSD,  The performance gain will astound you!

[ericepv]

A great way to free up space is to delete duplicate project archive files.

 

[DBCooper]

The SSD suggestion is great but if you are already using one then the only thing you could do is see if you can get a faster one.  The other thing to watch for is if you are using on online or network location to store your files, libraries, or backups.  This can sometimes cause performance problems.

 

Another thing you can do is figure out what is making your plan files so big and see if you really need those things.  For example, if you import a 50 page pdf just to show a single page, then create a pdf (or even better just an image) of that page and import that instead.  Another big cause of plan bloat is imported symbols.  If you can find something in the Chief library instead of using something from the internet, it will usually be smaller and work better.  

 

[RobDesLLC]

After the common practices of disk cleanup, I suggest you monitor your system performance in Task Manager. Is your CPU too heavily loaded, particularly when generating 3D views? How much memory are you using during a typical Chief Architect session? What do your read/write speeds look like to your storage device(s)?

 

My approach is to employ a 2TB NVME drive for Windows 11 and my apps, and another for storing my files. I have a third 2TB SSD (2.5") that is a mirrored copy of my storage drive. I have a 5950X processor with an AIO and 128GB of RAM. At my busiest, the CPU hovers around 30%, and memory usage is around 52GB. Typical boot time is 8 seconds. 

 

I try not to keep many browser windows open, as that tends to use up memory and slow things down. As a general practice, I find it's best not to leave apps running if they aren't in use. 

[RobDesLLC]

1 minute ago, DBCooper said:

The SSD suggestion is great but if you are already using one then the only thing you could do is see if you can get a faster one.  The other thing to watch for is if you are using on online or network location to store your files, libraries, or backups.  This can sometimes cause performance problems.

 

Another thing you can do is figure out what is making your plan files so big and see if you really need those things.  For example, if you import a 50 page pdf just to show a single page, then create a pdf (or even better just an image) of that page and import that instead.  Another big cause of plan bloat is imported symbols.  If you can find something in the Chief library instead of using something from the internet, it will usually be smaller and work better.  

 

 

This is very good advice. I too have found that the importation of PDF's bogs Chief down tremendously. Avoid this as much as possible.

[ericepv]

As Rob mentioned above, maximizing your RAM (I have 32 GB) is a cheap and easy way to improve performance.

[BenMerritt]

56 minutes ago, RobDesLLC said:

This is very good advice. I too have found that the importation of PDF's bogs Chief down tremendously. Avoid this as much as possible.

 

Out of curiosity, when was the last time you tested this? We made some significant improvements to PDF rendering performance in X13. There are still cases where performance can suffer — printing being one of them — but when just importing a PDF as a drawing reference, the software should be much more responsive than in prior versions.

[SHCanada2]

2 minutes ago, BenMerritt said:

Out of curiosity, when was the last time you tested this? We made some significant improvements to PDF rendering performance in X13. There are still cases where performance can suffer — printing being one of them — but when just importing a PDF as a drawing reference, the software should be much more responsive than in prior versions.

Doesnt CA link it by default as opposed to embedding 

[BenMerritt]

Just now, SHCanada2 said:

Doesnt CA link it by default as opposed to embedding

The default behavior is to reference the PDF as an external file rather than embedding it in the plan file. This has relatively little effect on how quickly the PDF draws in a plan view, but it does affect the plan file's size and the speed of some other operations (e.g. undo/redo). For those operations, referring to an external file should generally be faster.

[DBCooper]

Just to be clear, I would first make sure your hardware is at least as good as the "recommended" system listed here:

https://www.chiefarchitect.com/products/sysreq.html

 

After that, there can be a lot of other things that can really slow down your plans.  Here is a tech article that has a lot of info on improving performance (it looks like it was last updated this year so I am going to assume that all of this is still valid):

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

 

[Hammer7]

Thank you all for responding.  I think the problem might be entirely mine but it shows up with error messages in Chief.  I bought a gamer's computer two years ago, 4090 chip I believe with a small primary hard drive 120G and a large secondary drive 500G, I have 10 Gig of program files, have stripped out and cleaned disk restarted and it still says C drive is holding 115 gig with only 4.4gig available.  I'm wondering how to rework or reformat everything properly for enough storage.  Two or the error messages occured after working for a couple hours only to receive a message that the file was corrupted.

[rwdozier]

Hammer7,

 

I think you need some breathing room! A two year old PC should be able to accommodate PCIe M.2 2280 NVMe SSD. I added one to my six year old PC and it made a world of difference.

What are the specs on your processor? (your signature says only I9)  How much RAM, etc.?

 

Here's a possible economical solution:  https://a.co/d/5QzMj8w

[DBCooper]

Quote

 I think the problem might be entirely mine but it shows up with error messages in Chief

 

It would be really helpful to know what these error messages are.  Buying new hardware might not fix any of your problems.

 

 

[Hammer7]

Well, necessity being the mother of invention I was searching for solutions and part of the problem was temp files being in hidden folders.  By carefully exposing some of these files I was able to free up 22gb of available space on my c drive.  I'm certain there is more room available and I'm hoping I can figure out how to step by step delete and uninstall anything unnecessary.  Some of what was uncovered is related to importation of older chief files.  x13,14, 15 

[Hammer7]

The problem seems to have something to do with the save attributes creating an infinity problem where length is added to file names, in this case a pdf saved in a layout file.............

[rwdozier]

Is this a CA error? Regardless, close CA, rename the PDF file to old standard 11 character (8.3) format filename and try again.

[JLU_Design]

On 8/22/2024 at 2:50 PM, Hammer7 said:

C drive is holding 115 gig with only 4.4gig available

You definitely need a larger hard-drive.

You may need more ram as well.

If you are short on ram your computer may be trying to use a swap partition on the hard-drive as well which could be exasperating the problem.

 

I would also recommend this tool box to fix common windows problems which could potentially improve the performance of your PC.

https://christitus.com/downloads/

 

[DBCooper]

Quote

 

The problem seems to have something to do with the save attributes creating an infinity problem where length is added to file names, in this case a pdf saved in a layout...

 

 

Windows has a built in file/path name limit of around 256 characters.  This has nothing to do with how much disk space you have so buying a new hard drive might not solve these kinds of problems.  You might want to use shorter folder and file names and avoid nesting your file folders too deep.  You might want to also check to see if your user data folder is longer than it needs to be which can add to the problem.  Another problem I have seen happen is if you accidently open an archive file and then keep saving it back into the archive folder.  The file name can get really long in that case.

 

There is some more info about path names in this tech article:

https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00911/message-cannot-find-or-open-the-file-to-save-your-plan.html

 

Also, this related tech article has some info about organizing your plans:

https://www.chiefarchitect.com/support/article/KB-00562/organizing-your-plan-and-layout-files.html

 

[Doug_N]

Since Windows 10 the 256 file path limit has been removed, provided that you enable long file paths.

 

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/maximum-file-path-limitation?tabs=registry#enable-long-paths-in-windows-10-version-1607-and-later

[Smn842]

12 hours ago, Doug_N said:

Since Windows 10 the 256 file path limit has been removed, provided that you enable long file paths.

 

Windows has actually supported very long (approx 32K) path lengths for a very long time as NTFS supports it.  However to use such long paths instead of the usual MAX_PATH 260 character limit applications have had to use the applicable API version and specific prefix option and this is often not done hence the failures on long paths.   Even though Windows APIs have allowed 32K paths for a long time its taken a while for more of its own applications and utilities to catch up and use these features. The same goes for commercial applications where software developers are wary of allowing paths of a length that may then be hard for users to manipulate with file managers, archive tools etc if they don't support longer paths.

 

What changed from Windows 10 is that the need to use special options within applications can be avoided using the registry flag AND if an application has a manifest that indicates it supports this.  The reason for this application opt in is that applications could crash with longer paths depending on how they're written if they were forced upon them.

[jtcapa1]

On 8/22/2024 at 9:17 AM, BenMerritt said:

The default behavior is to reference the PDF as an external file rather than embedding it in the plan file. This has relatively little effect on how quickly the PDF draws in a plan view, but it does affect the plan file's size and the speed of some other operations (e.g. undo/redo). For those operations, referring to an external file should generally be faster.

I've enjoyed these improvements since PDF's are such a standard.

I wanted to ask you Ben, do you think that providing hyperlinks in my .plan files will slow things down?

I really like the embedded links that are part of exported PDF's that contractors, plan reviewers, clients and others, can access for say full specifications on various items.

[BenMerritt]

18 minutes ago, jtcapa1 said:

I wanted to ask you Ben, do you think that providing hyperlinks in my .plan files will slow things down?

I really like the embedded links that are part of exported PDF's that contractors, plan reviewers, clients and others, can access for say full specifications on various items.

 

I'm not the one who implemented the hyperlinking features, but I'd be surprised if they caused a measurable performance difference while working with the plan, especially if you're not adding hundreds or thousands of them.

[jtcapa1]

Not thousands.  But, on custom homes I may have up to 100 hyperlinks.

[BenMerritt]

I'd still expect the performance overhead to be relatively close to that of 100 text objects without the hyperlinks. I haven't benchmarked that or looked through that part of the code, though; that's just my intuition based on the general principles by which our text objects tend to operate.