How to "break" a 'simulate toolpath' calculation

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mtylerfl
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Re: How to "break" a 'simulate toolpath' calculation

Post by mtylerfl »

So even your Toolpath calculations are slow, in addition to the Toolpath previews. Very strange!
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TReischl
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Re: How to "break" a 'simulate toolpath' calculation

Post by TReischl »

Sure is strange that none of us with our slow cpu's and starved ram seem to be having this issue.

I downloaded the file you posted. Toolpath preview was a couple of seconds on this machine.

You may be a firm believer that lots more ram speeds things up. But that is a fallacy that has been discussed ad nauseam for years and years. There are specific types of programs that benefit from more ram, photo and video editing being a couple of them. Obviously Aspire is not since a lot of us run with as little as 4gb of ram and do not have performance issues. Heck, I run Rhino and Aspire at the same time on my 4gb machine. Rendering is a little slow but I do not do much of that in Rhino.

Time to take a look at what is all running on your machine and how you have that vm set up.

Just something I googled up:

"is 32gb RAM overkill?
In general, yes. The only real reason an average user would need 32GB is for future proofing. As far as just simply gaming goes, 16GB is plenty, and really, you can get by just fine with 8GB. In a handful of gaming performance tests, Techspot found basically no difference between 8GB and 16GB in terms of framerate.Feb 26, 2017
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Re: How to "break" a 'simulate toolpath' calculation

Post by mtylerfl »

pknvectric wrote:...Regardless, all of them seem to be slow...
Patrick,

I’m just curious if you have asked Vectric Tech Support about this. I wouldn’t be surprised if they recommended purchasing a new, up-to-date PC, but I’m wondering if anyone there had any insight or theories why your calculations and previews have been so slow.
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pknvectric
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Re: How to "break" a 'simulate toolpath' calculation

Post by pknvectric »

Why do I need volumes of RAM? I currently have 158 browser tabs open on my computer. :shock: (Not an exaggeration.) Plus databases, CAD software, Vectric, Illustrator, GIS, etc.

Discussions of "framerate" aren't terribly important unless you're video editing or playing games. What matters is how a person uses their machine. I've been in tech support / hardware support for decades. RAM is more important than anything else on my machine. :)

This is not necessarily the case for everyone but in my experience people work faster when their RAM is doubled. And their work speeds up again if they double it again. (Then again, SSD drives have relieved much of this constraint...)

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Re: How to "break" a 'simulate toolpath' calculation

Post by Rcnewcomb »

- Randall Newcomb
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Re: How to "break" a 'simulate toolpath' calculation

Post by TReischl »

pknvectric wrote:Why do I need volumes of RAM? I currently have 158 browser tabs open on my computer. :shock: (Not an exaggeration.) Plus databases, CAD software, Vectric, Illustrator, GIS, etc.
Really? And you are complaining about slow toolpath previews? Nah. 158 browser tabs? A lot of web pages are not static, that means they are busily updating themselves.

I am not wondering why your software is running slow, at all. Nope.
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Re: How to "break" a 'simulate toolpath' calculation

Post by mtylerfl »

:D
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Re: How to "break" a 'simulate toolpath' calculation

Post by ger21 »

Increasing RAM only increases speed if you are running out of RAM.


If you close your browser and it's 150+ tabs, does that affect Aspire's speed?

Have you ever looked at Task Manager to see how much RAM is available, and how much is being used?
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Re: How to "break" a 'simulate toolpath' calculation

Post by Adrian »

If I was you I would start looking at what the common factor between all the computers you have tested this on are. There has to be something in the way you set them up or some piece of software that you use that is causing the issues.

As a test I installed Aspire onto the slowest computer I own which is a netbook I use for surfing the web while I'm away. It has 2gb of RAM, an Intel Atom CPU at 1.44ghz and it runs Windows 10 on an SD card. I loaded your example file up even running it directly from a USB thumb drive to get everything as slow as possible.

Recalculate All took less than two seconds. Preview of selected toolpaths at standard resolution with animate preview on and draw tool off took 18 seconds. Preview All Toolpaths without clearing the preview took 5 seconds.

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Re: How to "break" a 'simulate toolpath' calculation

Post by jfederer »

pknvectric wrote:I currently have 158 browser tabs open on my computer. :shock: (Not an exaggeration.) Plus databases, CAD software, Vectric, Illustrator, GIS, etc.
RAM isn't the issue here. Processor load is. Every one of those 158 tabs, databases, CAD, etc. takes a recurring slice of the processor time, even for idling processes. GIS in particular is processor and RAM intensive. Even a 256 core processor (if such a thing existed) would have each core running several processes on a time slice basis. You're just overloading the computer. Like towing a few full transport trailers with your Ferrari and expecting it to beat the Tesla!
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Re: How to "break" a 'simulate toolpath' calculation

Post by ger21 »

In the current versions of Firefox, tabs don't load at all until you click on them. I frequently have 20-30 tabs open, and after stating Firefox, they don't do anything until you look at them.

Not saying it's not the problem. Task Manager will tell you.
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Re: How to "break" a 'simulate toolpath' calculation

Post by LittleGreyMan »

pknvectric wrote:The "Recalculate All" option required the following corresponding times: 1) 3'08" 2) 3'04" and 3) 3'33" . (So, yes, CPU speed matters.)
In your first post, you mentioned a "preview toolpath" issue, which is not the same problem. What's the actual issue?

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Re: How to "break" a 'simulate toolpath' calculation

Post by LittleGreyMan »

I just checked your file with the last Aspire trial running on a Windows 7 Vmware virtual machine on a MacBook Pro under Mojave.

Recalculate all is instantaneous (ie not measurable) and simulation requires 30s at "Very High (4x slower)" simulation quality with "Animate preview" and "Draw tool" on.

You'll have to look at the Task Manager on the Windows side and Activity monitor on the Mac side to understand what's happening. Probably a lot of swapping given the number of apps concurrently running.

Vectric staff will probably not help, as they do not support software running on VMs.

Adrian is right: "If I was you I would start looking at what the common factor between all the computers you have tested this on are. There has to be something in the way you set them up or some piece of software that you use that is causing the issues."

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Re: How to "break" a 'simulate toolpath' calculation

Post by pknvectric »

Yes, Vectric tech support is involved now and they are curious about the problem as well... (They have seen this on some other machines so they'll be researching further.)

Yes, of course before posting the initial comment I'd already tried closing all browsers / tabs / apps to try to isolate the problem but the results were the same. Yes, I've run these same toolpaths and had the same troubles on non-VM machines with no other apps open.

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Re: How to "break" a 'simulate toolpath' calculation

Post by mtylerfl »

Hi Patrick,

In the meantime, I’m wondering if it might be worth considering purchasing a nice, new PC (not a Mac).

You mentioned you have been having this problem for 4-5 years. That’s an awful long time to have your productivity hindered. I know I couldn’t endure that and would rather take remedial action as quickly as possible.
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