AD16 --- Still buggy, crashy and runs like a dog.

[krish2487]

An off-topic question,
has anyone used Altium on a windows server installation??


Has anyone compared the performance of AD on a desktop OS vs server OS scenarios??


We have a bunch of win server 2008 and 2012 enterprise and datacenter licenses and wanted to give AD a try.
(We are presently a complete linux shop and use eagle. We do use Win 2K8 server for out ERP package and it hasn't given a problem in 3 years and counting, not even a reboot. Now win desktop - that is a completely different issue)

[ajb]

Haven't had a chance to do very much at all in 16 yet, but I did just run an outjob that took for freaking ever to complete.  It wasn't anything huge, only ~170 parts on a 2-layer PCB, and a typical CM package of gerbers, PnP, and two BOM reports, but it probably took half an hour from start to finish.  Anyone else found outjobs to be particularly slow in 16?

[T3sl4co1l]

I've seen slow OutJobs in 14 and 15 before.

Slow networked drives are a big hit.
Online BOM queries (supplier links) tend to be slow.
I've seen STEP export chew for a long time, probably due to something weird in one of the models (the final file was over 100MB and, from a glance at the plaintext, looked to contain thousands of repeating or redundant structures).
I've also had AutoCAD export crash its module.

Tim

[mrpackethead]

The altium sales guys rang me today..  I asked them if they had read the comments in their blog.

https://blog.live.altium.com/#Blogs/new-features-you'll-only-see-in-altium-designer-16

[snoopy]

Still they reckon they have fixed over 200 bugs !! Hopefully it's the top 200 of the nastiest bugs

Matt Schwaiger United States Altium , 20 days ago Like
Hi All

We do appreciate all the (good and bad) comments and I apologize for not responding sooner. It is always our intent to diligently review and fix the most annoying and important bugs as well as listen to your feedback regarding ongoing improvements. As you know it is a fine balancing act but I can assure you we are listening and will continue to try harder.

Although this blog is meant to highlight the features which are coming soon to AD16, unfortunately it did not draw attention to the significant development (and testing) effort that has gone on behind the scenes into fixing over 200 reported bugs, including stability and performance issues.

Altium Designer 16 is in the final stages of beta testing and is still planned to be released this month - you will then have access to the full list of release notes.

Please continue to provide your comments or feel free to contact me directly at matt.schwaiger@altium.com

Kind Regards
Matt

[Bud]

Can anyone replicate this bug - in Via properties screen the "Drill Pair" field is transparent showing the board behind it. Seems only happening in Via properties dialog screen.

EDIT: Windows Pro 7 64-bit, Intel i7 CPU, 32Gb RAM, Nvidia GTX570/2Gb

[Bud]

After speaking w Altium support it was identified that switching the desktop theme from traditional to Win7 wit Aero fixed that. Not happy with that though, i want no freaking Win7 theme. Still considering this a bug. No single application should cause global change, running this computer for 3 years with traditional windows theme, never had problems.

[w3amd]

I can confirm that the software is quite buggy as well. Many times when you get an error it isn't 'caught' properly and leads to a terminal error window. This especially happens during importing. We haven't exactly figured out what some of the triggers are but what happens is memory access violations for which you can only press the OK button and then the software closes. OS Windows 7, Windows Server. We have special client setups for high speed 3D graphics 16GB cards, 8 core processors and 64 GB ram.

On the bright side we got this software (AD15) about 3 months ago and it's generally fantastic. To have SPICE built in and direct access to suppliers is quite nice.

I'll check if this has Embarcadero tags in it. I'll let you know what I see.

AD16 appears to be written in Microsoft Visual C because it's using a large amount of the MS Visual C libraries (you can see them in the directory). There is no sign that I can see this is written in Delphi or Builder.

[w3amd]

Third party libs are almost always a high risk because you don't know how well the error controlling code was written.

I don't see any Embarcadero signatures in DXP.exe
Even compiling and linked without debug info you get hooks and DXP doesn't appear to have them.

[w3amd]

This shows the same hooks in the release build of a sample exe.

Because of the way Delphi and Builder work they have the form (window) hooks for the class information.

Cheers

[w3amd]

Your right, I stand corrected. They used a stripper to strip out the exports section but the file itself has many string references to Delphi coding.

Then why aren't they catching the Exceptions in the main handler? My guess says they may have a third party component which is threading and errors are not coming from the main threads.

It's also funny that the first function call is IsDebuggerPresent.

I wonder why they have that in there :-)

Cheers

[w3amd]

Yeah INT3 unhandled exception catcher. Made famous by ASPack. Forget the original name. The import mangling was neat. Intel's secret opcode was neater,  Ice ice baby.

The root thing though is that none of them actually work besides an external hardware encryption key.

[Gixy]

Installed yesterday. Not all presets moved from AD15 . In the Project menu, there is only one command to compile, and this does nothing : no ERC produced... I'll try to re-install because I saw some errors during the first launch.