lag in Altium with Analyzing...

[asadi.siyavash]

Hi, when I moved component in my PCB, after it Altium Start Analyzing even I moved it just 1 mil in free positions. when it start Analyzing I can't do anything until its finishing. I don't have this problem before and I don't know which parameter caused this problem.
what I did for solved this problem:
1. delete all polygon
2. disable all ONLINE DRC
but my problem doesn't solved,

any help would be greatly appreciated.

[asadi.siyavash]

My problem Solved   
Because my board is high density I have to hidden dense nets like VCC and GND.
I hope it help someone.

[free_electron]

faster computer helps too 

[Korken]

faster computer helps too 

Not really.
I experience huge lags when moving stuff and when zooming/panning (if all rat-lines are showing) and I'm running on an Intel Core i7-5820K (6 cores/12 threads) at 3.3 GHz with 32GB of DDR4, 512GB SSD and an nVidia GTX980.
This is with only a 324 ball BGA + DDR2 in 84 ball BGA + passives. But Altium does not seem to be utilizing my CPU to the fullest.   

The best fix I found is to hide all ratlines and only show specific groups.

[DerekG]

I experience huge lags when moving stuff and when zooming/panning (if all rat-lines are showing) and I'm running on an Intel Core i7-5820K (6 cores/12 threads) at 3.3 GHz with 32GB of DDR4, 512GB SSD and an nVidia GTX980.
This is with only a 324 ball BGA + DDR2 in 84 ball BGA + passives. But Altium does not seem to be utilizing my CPU to the fullest.   

I presume you are running a 64 bit version of Windows?

32 bit Windows versions can only access 3GB of RAM.

Leaving open several Altium tabs (as in multiple pcbs) will also slow down the processor (as will leaving open a number of other Windoze applications).

[Korken]

DerekG:
Exactly, I am running Windows 7 Pro 64-bit and Altium 15.


I have found another thing that does not utilize more cores (which I really thought would): The autorouter helper when you do push and shove, and sneaking traces between/around vias.
It runs one of my cores at 80-100% while I'm drawing the trace, ~0% on the rest.

I'm no expert in autorouting, but I would believe it to be a search and pathfinding algorithm which tries to find an optimal path based on constraints.
This should be a classical optimization problem (hopefully convex) and all of the standard solutions for this are parallelizable.

But that's from my experience.
Maybe there are more advanced things that must be done in specific order and can't be done as sub-jobs here?

[DerekG]

I have found another thing that does not utilize more cores (which I really thought would)
It runs one of my cores at 80-100% while I'm drawing the trace, ~0% on the rest.

Yes, a common problem with Windows. Out of the box, at best, Windows manages to use 1 core for the program & 1 core for "computer housekeeping functions".

There are some programs that will let you fiddle around with how the Intel cores are utilised ............. but be careful.

One other thought, have you tried disabling your anti-virus/anti-malware/anti-spyware software to see if this speeds things up?

[Korken]

Indeed indeed.

On the anti-virus part, I have tried this (to no avail). But I had the same "problem" with my old computer as well.
The program is just not designed to utilize all cores available. Just to find a set of settings that works good.

[dboyer]

I think it's a straight forward effect of Altium being a single-threaded 32-bit application.  It hits the 32-bit memory limit and starts choking really bad, and no matter how many cores you have, it only runs off of one of them.  The only benefit to all that ram and all those extra cores is that it gives your machine resources for the other tasks that may be running like your OS or other background applications.

Now, why in the year of our lord 2015, a program needs to take so long to do simple operations like move tracks around is just a testament to what I suspect is crap data structures the software is using internally.  Only so much hardware you can throw at a problem when they're using structures and algorithms internally that scale poorly when the number of objects starts growing.

[free_electron]

altium is 32 bit . blame Borland (embarcadero) for that. they are dragging their feet releasing the 64 bit compiler ...

you may want to turn off a bunch of realtime design rule checkes that are unimportant . that speeds up things tremendousley


during interactive route all you really need is width , gap , via and short circuit.

all the rest is not needed and better run in batch mode.

i've done huge boards like that without lag.

[DerekG]

you may want to turn off a bunch of realtime design rule checkes that are unimportant . that speeds up things tremendousley
i've done huge boards like that without lag.

Yes, and have open as few boards (in the tabs menu) as possible.

[snoopy]

Had a similar problem and was driving me nuts as it only started doing this It was like components were stuck to the board and you could only move them ever so slightly and each time it was reanalyzing the nets and slowing down the whole program

Found out what it was in the end. In the Interactive routing preferences make sure 'Component Pushing' is set to 'Ignore' and not to 'Avoid' which was causing all of the problems !

cheers

[MIDdleT]

i have same problems. Always "Analyzing GND" will lugging at poor PC.
and i found this page

http://wiki.altium.com/display/ZHPROD/Software+run+slow

item 9:

If the analysis of a net such as (e.g., "Analyzing GND") is taking a long time, try hiding the connections for the ground net. Use the shortcut N, H, N, then click on a net pad or track that represents the net. This will prevent Altium Designer from analyzing the connections for that particular net; however, it will also hide the connections for that net.

maybe it helps to you

[T3sl4co1l]

Related problem, sometimes after moving an object, it pauses for a second or more.  The problem seems to be, populating the PCB List Panel with all objects on the PCB -- try setting it to view only objects of one uncommon type (Selected rather than Unmasked, or e.g. object type Pads rather than All), or just close it.

Tim

[pa2ees]

In Altium 19, I hid the Properties panel, and that sped things up quite a bit.