Plotting 2005 how slow is it for you?

[kdayman]

Since setting up all our users with 2005, we have found the plotting was pathetically slow. Reducing the number of ctb's in the designated directory helped a lot but still much slower than the 2002's plotting that we were previously doing, and 2003 we didn't have to reduce the number of ctbs.

Anyone else have this experence? any recomendations?

Kelly

[Kiley]

Yeah I had the same problem but I found that removing the ctb files from the the common directory on the server onto my computers hard drive sped it up some but it still isn't as fast as 2000i/2002.

[RobertB]

What part of plotting? The interface, the creation of the plot file, or the transmission of the plot file to the plotter itself?

[kdayman]

What part of plotting? The interface, the creation of the plot file, or the transmission of the plot file to the plotter itself?

I would say the interface. I was in one of our offices last week, they had juct switched to 2005 from 2002 a week earlier. A user asked me to plot from his machine so I could experiance it myself. The plot dialog took over a minute to appear after the plot command was issued, then any changes (ctb, scale etc.) also took over 60 seconds. It was painful. All users point to a common ctb directory on the server, upon inspection I found 325 ctb files (including 2 sub directories). I then copied 12 ctbs to another directory and change the path in the users settings. This increased the plotting time to a bearable level hover still slower than 2003 reading the 325 files.

Does this answer you question?

Kelly

[RobertB]

Yes it did. We haven't noticed any large performance hit in the interface, but we also do not have anywhere near 300+ plot styles (yikes!) or even sub-folders required.

[Beth Powell]

Are you using the new background plotting? You have to set that up first. (Options>Plot & Publish tab>Background processing options midway down on the left.

That said, because of this, you may see a lag in plotting depending on how ACAD is handling.

[kdayman]

Are you using the new background plotting? You have to set that up first. (Options>Plot & Publish tab>Background processing options midway down on the left.

That said, because of this, you may see a lag in plotting depending on how ACAD is handling.

Background plotting is not enabled. Which would be most effecent enabled or disabled?

Kelly

[Beth Powell]

It was designed for everyone to use background plotting. That frees up your system. I believe leaving it not enabled will slow down considerably. Out of the box, it is not checked as enabled. In my opinion, it should be checked and made enabled by default.

Try that and see if you like it. You'll get a tiny printer icon in the lower right of the screen that will show you that it's plotting. When it's complete, you'll have a notification and chance to save a report as well. You will be notified if there are errors as well.

Let us know how you make out.

[kdayman]

I will try enabling it on some of the machines and report back the results.

Thanks,

Kelly

[tomdillenbeck]

I would bet you won't be happy with background plotting enabled. We've had a lot of trouble at our office with background plotting. It takes forever and a day to plot, sometimes it fails.
We had it turned on by default when it was rolled out, but have since instructed everyone to turn it off if they want their plots anytime soon.

[jfranco]

I'm having the same problem, after I finish previewing it takes a while to
get my plot menu screen.

I do have my CTB's on the server, 41 of them

I have P4 3.0Ghz, 2Gb Ram, ATI FireGL 8800 128Mb Ram.
I don't think it's the machine.

A suggestion:
Our licenses are located on the server.
Can it be that AutoCAD tries to verify if you have the authentic version
of the program every time you try to plot ?
Therefore slowing down your plot preview ?

Joe Franco
Groupe Stavibel

[richard.binning]

I can plot a drawing faster across the WAN from home than you are describing.
It's gotta be something else besides the number of CTB files and or the fact that
they are located on a server. We keep all our plotstyles on a server and use shortcuts in our plot styles folder to point the user to the network.

Do you notice a lag in general when running commands at the command line or when using the "file save/open" dialog boxes?

What is your client OS? What is your server OS? What connection speed are you connecting at?

[valeriu_chiorean24144]

I have the same problem, it takes a lot of time to refresh the changes in the plot window after I change the potter. We currently don't use .ctb only .stb, we have only one .stb file.

Another issue, I have a laser color A3 printer that's capable of printing 1260x297mm when I select the long paper format it switches from mm to inches automatically no matter if I selected mm as paper units in all the menus.

[stilesj]

I have only noticed slowness in the plot window at first...when I first change the plotter. After that, it seems pretty normal. Our pc3 and ctb files are on the server, so it is accessing them across the network, but we only have about 6 plotters and 4 ctb files.

As far as background plotting, my experience has been that this is slower than regular plotting, so that your computer has resources free for you to keep working. That's great if you are doing a Publish of many plots and want to be able to keep drawing while it plots, but if you need that plot now, I wouldn't use background plotting for that.

[jfranco]

Our server is a COMPAQ ProLiant ML350,
Pentium III 1.3Ghz, 1 Gb Ram, Windows 2000 Server - Service Pack 4.
I'm using *.PC3 and *.PMP created from AutoCAD 2004, these files are located on the server.
The plotting it's self is fast. It's just when leaving the preview screen that it takes longer to get
the plot menu screen.

Joe Franco
Groupe Stavibel

[mikeevans]

We upgraded from 2004 to 2005 and have had the same problems.

In general we have found that the plotting was far slower than 2004 and the overall performance of the application had declined somewhat.

Now I have got 2005 to run and plot faster than 2004 here's the deal.

Remove the link in the start menu > programmes > startup regarding Autocad.

Rename the Wscommagent.exe thing, just got to the autodesk website Periodically.

Move all files and paths to the 'Host' workstation.

Plotter = Xes8825.
We had the PC3 file "Xes8.hdi" driver sending files directly via. the network port to the plotter. This was extremely slow.

Configure autocad to have the default printer as the "none" or default option.

If you install the plotter as a network printer then configure acad to use the system printer option it runs faster than 2004.

I have two Ctb's (b/w & Co) and plots of up to 80MB running.

The Slowlayers (Slayers) syndrome is still annoying me though.

I must admit, I have not fully tested it yet. Keep you posted.

Mike.

[kdayman]

Thanks Mike I will try this as soon as possible. I am traveling this week so it will be next week until I have a chance to try it out.

[mikeevans]

Several Steps to success...

Set the default printer in 'Preferances > plotting options' as the none option.

Do not use 'save changes to the layout' radio button instead use the page setups.

We use limits here so you need to create a view as per the limmin and limmax variables I have set this up as a lisp that runs on opening drawings.

Set the plotter up in the 'windows printers' as a network plotter server, install into autocad using the 'System printer' option using the *GDI8.hdi (optimised) drivers for your plotter.

If you follow the above steps then you should have plotting success. The dialogue and regeneration is ten fold faster than normal.

The main problem seems to be that when you open the dialogue if the plotter is already selected it slows down while it's connecting and generating the views. This seems especially true if you use a HDI driver posting directly to the Plotter IP address.

I'm still dumfounded by the speed of the DWF plotting, this seems extreemly slow. That's next.

Happy hunting.

Mike.

[jkipfer]

What was the conclusion; background plotting enabled or disabled?

Thanks,

Jason

[nick.beaven]

Plotting in background has been a pain for us also, we did the same and rolled out loads of PCs with it enabled, only to the turn it back off after user feedback. The quickest way we have found to plot has been by using the sheet set manager, and batch printing everything, even if its one or two drgs.

[numa]

A suggestion.... When you see significant slowdowns, and you suspect a network interaction is the issue... try using a packet sniffer (such as Ethereal) and capture all the data going back and from server, etc. If you see strange issues such as a dns resolution problem, or something, ethereal will show you. Yes, it creates a mountain of data, but it is very usefull and will probably point you to the answer. Beware, if you are on a switched network, you will have to enable the switch to repeat data to a manager port or etc. ) So, you will probably have to sniff from the server itself or the client itself.
numa

[sinc]

We recently got a server at our company, and reconfigure our peer-to-peer network as a full-blown server-based network. When that happened, the plot dialogs on two of our computers started taking a good five seconds to appear. Pretty annoying.

I tried all the tips I could find, including those found here (http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/item?siteID=123112&id=2883747&linkID=2475323) and here (http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/item?id=2873638&linkID=2475323&siteID=123112), with no success.

Finally, I started searching the registry. When we changed the computer network around, we changed the names of the machines, and I found all kinds of old references to the old machines in the registry. I deleted or updated them, and that fixed the problem!

Attempting to pin it down further, I did some more exploration. I reloaded my "bad" registry, and tried removing keys one at a time. Finally, I determined that the culprit seems to have been the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareAutodeskAutoCADR16.0ACAD-208:409ProfilesLand DesktopDialogsPlotPlotToFileBrowseDir

...which, of course, is the item in the "Plot to File:" item in the plot dialog. I basically never use "Plot to File", so I hadn't paid any attention at all to it. It was pointed to a now-nonexistent directory on a nonexistent machine, and I hadn't noticed because it was greyed out. Still, every time the plot dialog opened, it evidently tried to resolve this path, which caused the delay.

Just to be safe, I went ahead and deleted or changed all references to nonexistent computers from my registry, and things seem happy. It even seems to start up faster. (We're still using Autocad 2004, btw.)

[H.Hunter]

We have problems with 2005 as well when it comes to plotting. Although we discovered that it is the ctb path that was dragging it down. With that mapped to a local server instead of a main server, it sped up plotting by a million light years (or at least that what it feels like in the end). However, when we try to do Publish sets whether from scratch or loading an existing dsd file, it takes forever. (I'm actually doing one now that's been going for about 30 minutes. Got on here to find an answer.) I thought maybe it's too many drawings, but then what the heck would be the point of publishing a set? If anyone has any ideas let me know.

[wellofthe7]

err... this was so informative... I have a bunch of ppl running on v2004, and one of them seems to have the slow interface problem (in fact I know he does, because i just spent 1 hour trying to fix it up...) and I tried getting rid of all his unused ctb files (243 of them).

His Options for plotting are all directed at his C drive, not the network, but even if I change this there is no change in the time it takes to open his plot interface window...

So I'm basically stuck and was wondering if this related at all to the posts on 2005?

Please check it out and give me some hints, I'll be your CAD friend for life...

Thanks !