2013 Unbearably Slow

3bucktruck

I've been a SU pro user since v.2, and I'm having an experience with v.2013 that is infuriating.

I have to leave my desk walk away and find something else to do for sometimes several minutes while I'm waiting for a save. This can be the case on models that are 3mb up to 15mb. It doesn't seem to matter.
At some point in the development of a model it becomes impossible to copy components in the same model without serious lag, about a minute before I'm able to locate and place my cursor. It takes two of these lags to copy, but if I paste in place and move it isn't affected. Similarly, if I try to insert a component I get that lag.
Again, at some point in the model development I can't explode larger components without seriously long waits. It's taken one hour on several occasions.
When I open up the Components menu and select "in model" I have to wait a couple of minutes up to ten minutes for it to recover. Then I can "purge unused" normally for the most part.

There is no work-around. I have done this on two different computers now after I told my boss I need a real video card and 16mb+ RAM. He gave me a new build with all that and i7 processors and SSD. This new computer is worthless or there is a problem with 2013.

I have to bring in my personal laptop with my personal SU Pro v.6 license so I can get any work done. I take the exact same models (saved backwards compatible to v.6) and I work on them the way I've worked on SU models for 15 years. This is crazy. I can't install v.6 on new machines. What is the deal?

I know about the "don't update thumbnail image" fix that was posted. It had no effect. It's not shadows and textures. All of that is relative. If they are off or on all these lag problems persist, it's just slightly worse if I have shadows on.

AndrewS

Hi, Bob,

I'm sorry to hear of your frustrations and problems. I'll forward this thread to our support and QA teams and see if they have any ideas.

In the meantime, here are a few of my thoughts.

@3bucktruck said:

I have to leave my desk walk away and find something else to do for sometimes several minutes while I'm waiting for a save.
I was going to suggest that you might have an aging hard drive and that upgrading to an SSD would help. But you have an SSD, so forget that. Just make sure you're working with models that are stored on your local machine rather than on a shared filesystem; holding open file handles over the network can cause severe lag.

@3bucktruck said:

At some point in the development of a model it becomes impossible to copy components in the same model without serious lag...

Again, at some point in the model development I can't explode larger components without seriously long waits...

When I open up the Components menu and select "in model" I have to wait a couple of minutes up to ten minutes for it to recover. Then I can "purge unused" normally for the most part.
This sounds absolutely awful. I've never heard of such problems before. Can you please check out the "Model Info" window on a couple of the files that are giving you fits and post the stats for us? I'm curious of there's anything illuminating there.

@3bucktruck said:

I have done this on two different computers now after I told my boss I need a real video card and 16mb+ RAM. He gave me a new build with all that and i7 processors and SSD. This new computer is worthless or there is a problem with 2013.

I assume you mean 16GB+, not 16MB+, but if you have any sort of reasonable video card, I don't think video memory is your problem. The majority of the issues you mention have nothing to do with the graphics card anyway.

I was going to suggest trying a second computer, but you've already done that. However, since you're working on a company-owned computer, I wonder if there's possibly an anti-virus or anti-malware program interfering to such a large degree that SketchUp can't perform its disk I/O at normal speed. If you have the chance to check out the same model on a personal computer or something, perhaps that would be helpful.

Along those same lines, it would be good to pull up the Task Manager or Resource Monitor. In particular, if you can sort the list of active processes by CPU usage from highest to lowest, then position it so you can still see it while working in SketchUp, you may be able to see if it's actually SketchUp that's chewing up the whole CPU while you're waiting for it to do things, or if perhaps there are other processes getting in the way.

@3bucktruck said:

I can't install v.6 on new machines. What is the deal?
The deal is that SketchUp 6, useful as it is in this particular circumstance, is ancient. We simply cannot continue to provide support for the old stuff. There are known limitations in the SU 6 installer (and probably 7 and 7.1 IIRC) that will prevent installation on new computers, and there's nothing we can do.

Another question would be in regard to whether you're running any plugins at all. If so, it's totally possible that a rogue Ruby script is chewing up all of SketchUp's resources. Please let us know of any plugins you're using.

My final suggestion is this: SketchUp 2014 is available now, and as it's been less than a year since you bought 2013, it's a free upgrade under your support agreement. Since it installs and works side-by-side with 2013, there's no harm in adding it to your work computer and seeing if it behaves any better with the problematic files than 2013 does. If you need to save as 2013 format for others' sake, that's easy to do as well.

Sorry again for your struggles. I'll see if we can find you some help from our side, and I'm sure the folks in the community here will have some ideas as well.

Andrew

3bucktruck

Andrew, those are all good insights. I am on a network. I'll start by saving my model locally, which will be SSD, and I'll check resources. Those are pretty quick to check. Then I'll look into the other possibilities. Thanks for taking the time to think through those symptoms. Yes, it was 16GB, rather than 16MB. "I remember when 1MB RAM was $40."

Zinc365

Hey everyone,

I have the same problem in 2013 as well with the ridiculous saving speed even though I have it on an SSD but then again my file is over 40mb. I am working on a custom built machine with 2 SSd's 2 HDD's and an AMD 8 core processor clocked at 4GHz, nVidia GTX 770 with 2gb of graphics ram and 16GB of RAM. Overall the computer is a tank but sketchup is still running a bit slow. I have updated to 2014 Pro and have seen some improvements. Saving speed is a bit faster but not instant. In 2014 if your file is to large and you try to bring in a realistic tree you will crash the program.

So this is not a hardware problem as far as I can tell if someone else is having the same problem with their computer as well. The program has its faults.

I will say there are still bugs that they are still working on fixing and it will take time. SO be patient.

Zinc365

tt_su

@zinc365 said:

In 2014 if your file is to large and you try to bring in a realistic tree you will crash the program.

Actually crash? With a BugSplat? (If so, did you submit it? Did you enter any information we can use to look it up?)
Or did you mean it became unresponsive?

AirWindSolar

@3bucktruck said:

Yes, it was 16GB, rather than 16MB. "I remember when 1MB RAM was $40."

Back in the day when a GUI and a WYSIWYG word processor could run like a champ on a machine with 4M RAM, and both could install from about a dozen 1.44M floppies?

It's downright vile how many apps now take 1000x as much in the way of resources to do the same task with only a few useful new features.