Autodesk answers – 4 of 4

Autodesk answers – 4 of 4

The final question is from metis:

Q: why is program size increasing and performance dramatically decreasing as hardware specs dramatically increase? as features “improve” and are added functionality should not be removed, and code should be streamlined.

seriously aren’t there any real programmers out there anymore? this thing isn’t written in java by a bunch of scriptkiddies (although 2009 sure is skinned like it was).

A: We made a number of performance improvements in AutoCAD 2010 over the previous release, and would appreciate hearing from you if you are encountering significant performance slowdowns with this latest release. If so, please send us details on what you were doing at the time, sample files if possible, and details on the machine you are using. This will help us improve performance further in upcoming releases of AutoCAD.

8 Comments

  1. Matt Stachoni

    The much-needed CUIx feature in 2010 should result in a noticeable increase in load speed, because it is essentially a Zipped compressed “package” format which includes additional resource files that would otherwise need to be loaded. In fact you can rename the CUIx file with a .ZIP extension to view its contents.

    Up to and including 2009, CUI is a horribly broken, slow format because it is straight XML, which needs to be parsed line by line and then rebuilt from scratch every time even a minor change is made.

    Autodesk’s abusive use of XML is peppered throughout the UI. It is the key reason why the Tool System is slow, why closing AutoCAD is slow (all of the changes need to be properly flushed back out to XML), and negatively affects about a million other things in the UI.

    CUI is particularly bad because CUI files grow like weeds as they are edited; files over 1MB are quite common. And when you are loading several CUIs off of a network drive – by every single ACAD user – load times can get very slow.

    What Autodesk SHOULD have done from the start is create a truly compiled XML format for all of these types of files. This would drastically reduce the file size and improve performance across the board. The downsides of using a compiled format are very small – a simple decompiler would be effortless to create.

  2. metis

    oh 10 is leaps and bounds ahead of 09, but it’s still less speedy than 08, which was slower than 06. granted 06 is now gone so i can’t directly compare, but 08 had features that made the upgrade worth it. 09 was such a performance drop that there was no way i could justify rolling it out to the office.

    i’m glad that 10 is an improvement (it’s a huge one) and am going to roll it out after sp1, but in what other industry is this acceptable?

    can you imagine if the 09 ford taurus got 20% worse mileage than the 08, accelerated and braked slower, added an mp3 player and gps, and every button including the wipers now took 3 clicks by default to operate(but you could get back to one click if you were clever)? now the 10 is better than 09, and but still isn’t as peppy as stuff from the early 00’s. detroit would be in the crapper….

  3. Chuck Dodson

    In my first ten minutes of actually using 2010 for something other than playing with new features, I’ve noticed selecting xreference names in the xref manager to be slow. The BatchPlot does not preview (although, I just previewed the same drawing in 2008 with no trouble). When I press the preview button, I see something in my command line about a reference being orphaned (it goes by quickly), but when I go back and examine the contents of my command line, I can never find any mention of an orphaned reference. I’ve noticed the reference manager responds more quickly if it’s docked, but it’s still slow to respond.

  4. DON NELSON

    I JUST LOADED AUTOCAD 2010 AND I AM SHOCKED TO FIND OUT THAT THERE IS A FULL TWO SECOND DELAY WHEN I TYPE A COMMAND AT THE COMMAND LINE! I MEAN WHEN I TYPE A “M” FOR MOVE IT TAKES TWO SECONDS FOR THE “M” TO APPEAR ON THE COMMAND LINE. IT ALSO TAKES TWO SECONDS TO ESCAPE AFTER HITTING THE ESCAPE KEY. MAYBE THERE IS A PATCH COMING OUT SOON. I WENT TO THE WEB AND IT IS FULL OF THREADS OF PEOPLE WITH THE SAME ISSUE.

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