Altium Designer with an A2 sheet, slow/unresponsive - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: senso
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: September 02, 2015, 01:02:33 pm
content: Good evening, I'm currently using Altium 14.3(not original, student budget...) and I'm currently in the mid of a large-ish design and I'm using an A2 sheet size for everything, and Altium feels very slow, almost an half second delay between click and action/response, not a system limitation, because Altium is only using one core, and I'm running 16GB's RAM, an i7-2670QM, already running on the dedicated GT630M GPU, I also have a Crucial MX200 250GB SSD, ram usage right now with altium, dozens of datasheets open and Chrome is at 5.15GB, CPU usage is at 10%, system temperature, around 38 to 44ºC, not a problem with the laptop, just Altium seems stupid that only uses one core and might not be liking sooo much crap in a single sheet.Maybe this is the signal to learn how to do multi-sheet designs?Best regards-

author: T3sl4co1l
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 02, 2015, 03:01:44 pm
content: Large sheets are terrible, no matter how you cut it... if that helps any.The click-response delay seems like accumulated cobwebs: have you tried restarting Altium? In my experience, it's very responsive from a fresh start, but after some hours of use (or hours to days of sitting idle), it manages to become quite slow again. The response applies to any subsystem of the overall program; you can close SCH windows and reopen them, and then the SCH view will be fast, but the Inspector panel will still be slow.It's not a caching or swapping problem, because as you note, you have more than enough memory to hold Altium and all its resources (it crashes much beyond 1GB anyway!), and it doesn't go away with use (back in the days of limited RAM, returning to a swapped program would only un-swap memory on a need-to-know basis, so the first few operations are extremely slow, then they return to normal after use; this Altium symptom doesn't go away with use, but seems to only get worse over time).Tim

author: free_electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 02, 2015, 03:38:01 pm
content: Altium is still a 32 bit app and can't allocate more than 3 GB anyway , even on 64 bit platformsAltium is very picky on the graphics card though.I see lots of people complain about sluggy performance. I have monstrous designs open ( 3800 components, 18000 pins ) without problems.- Win7 64 bit Enterprise- 8 GB ram- I7 -4800 @2.7Ghzso far this is nothing special... but now :- nVidia Quadro K3100 with 4 Gb of ram- two 30 inch 2560x1600 displays. (Z30i) running over displayport- one 1920x1080 monitorno problem whatsoever.The kick is in the graphics card. Altium heavily uses DX11 with some specific shader model ... can't remember. 3 i believe. you need a card that can do it in hardware.

author: Mechatrommer
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 02, 2015, 03:48:15 pm
content: Quote from: free_electron on September 02, 2015, 03:38:01 pmirrelevant!...btw off topic, i've been searching locally for >23" monitor to no avail. where did you get that 30" and what brand?

author: senso
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: September 02, 2015, 04:27:43 pm
content: Started to split up the design, use sheets, repeats, and lets see how many thousand errors I will get when I try to go to the pcb layout.The first thing that is confusing me is passing nets/signals between sheets, but if needed I will nag you guys again.Thanks for the fast response.Up to A3 it doesn't complain or lag a bit, in A2 sheet its bad, and gets worse as the design goes, but with hierarchical sheets its all more organized and I learned something new today.I have been using Altium with the measly HD3000 and even with the 3D never had a issue, just tried with the dedicated today due to this behaviour, I believe that a good card will influence in real men designs, not my puny little inventions, and yeah the gt630m is very old, its root is the gt425M that is over 6 years old.I'm also on a Full HD display, but its only 15.6".In the offtopic response, I bought a 24" FHD Asus dispay for like 120€, then I bought the FHD display for the laptop and never used it again

author: free_electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 02, 2015, 05:15:45 pm
content: Quote from: Mechatrommer on September 02, 2015, 03:48:15 pmscreens are irellevant , but the graphics card isn't.the monitors are Hewlett-Packard Z30i

author: tszaboo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 10, 2015, 07:08:04 pm
content: Quote from: free_electron on September 02, 2015, 03:38:01 pmIt is DX 9.c Shader model 3. I dont think it has any DX 11 code, that is like 2009 and windows 7 and up.I dont think it is a graphics card issue, just the way it handles the SCH editor. For me 3D is fluently working, while with A3 sheets sometimes I get little laggy performance.I guess it is easier to draw thousands of components with fancy step files than lines.

author: jd
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: September 11, 2015, 05:47:15 am
content: For me I found the bottleneck was - unbelievably - drawing the grid!Try changing to a "dot" grid or turning it off.I found changing to the "discrete" GPU from the integrated Intel one fixed it too. But it was the grid causing the original slowdown and lagging cursor, everything else was fine.

author: free_electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 11, 2015, 06:34:10 am
content: The intel gpus are horrid ! I have mever seen one where altium ran fluidly.Ati graphics cards sometimes have rendering artefacts and problems on suspend/resume. Nvidia seems to work best