ACAD 2013 SP2 Shift-Deselect works, but super slow. Issuing commands is slow.

[Professor Lavahot]

I'm running a fully updated AutoCAD 2013 64 SP2, on Windows 7 64 SP1 with full Windows Updates.
Computer is an Intel Core i7-2600 CPU @ 3.40 GHz, 8.0GB RAM, NVIDIA Quadro 2000 (with latest drivers).
Paging file is set at min. 2.8 MB, max. 5.6 MB, per advice from here.
Hardware acceleration is on, but the problem is the same with H.A. off.
I keep Properties, Layer and XREF palettes open all the time on a second monitor.
All Windows 7 fancy-graphics themes are turned off, AutoCAD is run in classic mode. WSCommCenter.exe is disabled in the registry, so no AD360 stuff ever pops up.
Virus Scanner is Avast!, I don't have the ability to make it ignore individual .DWG file types, but it is set to exclude AutoCAD.
All files being worked on are held on a networked server, but these problems remain even if I'm working on a file stored locally.
I turned off AUTOCOMPLETEMODE, ROLLOVERTIPS, PROPERTYPREVIEW, HIGHLIGHT, and various other AutoCAD features that require a lot of 'thinking.'

About a week ago, I noticed three things:

1. Holding down SHIFT and drawing a window to deselect objects works, but it takes 10+ seconds to work and you can't see the selection window while its operating, so it's useless.
2. Typical commands like COPY, MATCHPROPERTIES, MTEDIT, etc. take a very long time to occur.
3. God help you if you type in a command wrong, you might as well get up and get a coffee while AutoCAD realizes no such command exists.
4. AutoCAD shuts down without providing the option to save a recovery file at random, usually after switching to a different program and back to AutoCAD, then entering any command.

If anybody has some advice for dealing with these issues, I'd like to hear it, and turn this thread into something future users can find and use. Let me know what else I can provide to narrow things down. I'll save a dump file the next time AutoCAD crashes.

Thanks,

Kevin

[rkmcswain]

Regarding 1, 2, and 3, try this as a TEST (not a permanent solution of course).

Physically disconnect all network connections and disable any Wifi connections, so that the machine has ZERO network capabilities.
Does it act the same, specifically #3?

[Professor Lavahot]

@rkmcswain:

Yes, using a local file with the network disabled, problems 1-3 become near-instantaneous actions. Feels like a sports car.
But using a local file with the network enabled, the problems return. Hmm.

[rkmcswain]

Use Process Monitor to watch file/registry activity. I can almost assure you that AutoCAD (via the O/S) is looking for a network resource that cannot be found. When there are ZERO network connections, the O/S doesn't ever bother to look, so no delay.

I wrote this up a long time ago ( http://bit.ly/18Sd7XZ ), when the app name was called FileMon - but it is named Process Monitor now.

In one of my cases, a laptop was removed from the office and used at home, where it was connected to the Internet via Wifi. There was a path embedded in the registry to the office domain (i.e.: myworkoffice.com/standards/example.dwg). So while it was in the office, this path resolved fine - but at home, the O/S was searching on the Internet for myworkoffice.com, and of course failing after the mandatory ±60 sec search, in between every command...!

I have also seen this happen when office servers are removed from the network or renamed.

[Professor Lavahot]

Cool program!

It's hard to tell because thousands of processes are going by every second (even with everything but AutoCAD and Chrome turned off) but it looks like when I'm trying to deselect objects:

the result of ACAD processes is "NAME NOT FOUND" on a "CreateFile" operation on C:\Windows\CSC\v2.0.6\namespace\NAS
"NAS" is the name of the server drive all of our drawing files are kept on.

Also, every couple of seconds, AutoCAD can't find a registry variable "XREFSTATE" located in the registry.


The answer's in here somewhere...
EDIT: According to Windows Explorer, Windows\CSC is empty. So no offline files, eh? Hmmm...

[Professor Lavahot]

Well, I turned Offline Files off, restarted, and found performance to be worse.

So I turned Offline Files back on, restarted, and it's working considerably better!

There's still a noticeable <1 sec. pause on entering a gibberish command, or copying objects, or shift-deselecting, but it takes much less time.


EDIT: but it came back after opening multiple files and getting to work again......

[rkmcswain]

Yea, I found the XREFSTATE issue a while back. I don't think it's causing any harm (of course it sure isn't helping).
If you really want to fix this, take a look at: http://forums.augi.com/showthread.ph...=1#post1200789

Ok, so you can't try to watch the Process Monitor in real-time, just let it run in the background while you're working.
When you get to a point where AutoCAD freezes, make note of the time.
Then after you have captured a few "freeze ups", you can stop the Process Monitor, and review the data. Look for the timestamps on the far left column and big gaps in the time (you should be monitoring "acad.exe" only). When you see a multi-second gap, start reviewing the data just above it - looking for NOT FOUND status. It's not an exact science, so it's hard to say exactly what to look for.

I had a machine the other day that was giving me fits on QSAVE and Autosave and there was a 5 to 6 second flat out stop in the "acad.exe" process, so it was easy to find.

[rkmcswain]

Well, I turned Offline Files off, restarted, and found performance to be worse.

I'm shocked that made it worse, and suspect a coincidence at play here.
Killing offline files on our machines only resulted in improvements.

[BlackBox]

The only speculative answer I see for the degradation in performance is that their offline files configuration allowed for the. To be working off of local cache files, and disabling forced the working from network location(s). Just a possibility.

[Professor Lavahot]

Whenever I disabled offline files, AutoCAD became busy looking for (and not finding) .cuix files over and over again, like "acetmain.cuix."

The same thing actually occurs when offline files are turned on and I make the folders that AutoCAD is searching for in the CSC directory (see screenshot.)

As usual, all my tinkering is making it worse. Maybe there's an issue with the support folders AutoCAD is going through, I'm going to make all of them local to my machine and see if it helps.