Altium Circuit Studio limitations - do free vias count as pads?

[daqq]

Hi guys,

I wanted to ask about this:

While there are no 'hard limits' per se, the software has been engineered to make it impractical for use with large designs. To this end, the PCB Editor will start to exibit performance degradation when editing designs containing 5000 pads, becoming virtually unusable with designs containing 50,000 pads. Degradation itself takes the form of progressive slow-down in PCB editing functions (such as routing, placing components, polygon pours, etc).

Do free vias (vias that are not needed for a signal connection, but rather for functions such as stitching ground planes, via fences and similar) count as a pad and contribute to this limitation, or do they not contribute to the total number of pads?

I can live with the 5k pads limitation, but if vias are included then that's a problem.

Thanks,

David

[T3sl4co1l]

It's probably not pads per se, but the sheer amount of stuff on screen that's badly optimized and hence not usable on large designs.

Easy way to tell: paste array (or did they remove that function) a pile of trace segments, then a pile of vias, then components, and so on.  See which one slows down the most.

Tim

[daqq]

I've tried emailing them, no luck so far...

If it's 5k of anything than that's a problem.

[T3sl4co1l]

Well, not 5k of anything.  You might have 5k of pads, and 2k of vias, and 50k of traces, and 100s of footprints (each with a dozen or so traces on various layers), in such a design.  That's what I was trying to get across...

Tim