Oh my, Oh slow

Need an excuse for an extended coffee break? Or, in European countries, another smoke break?

Search for a command in AutoCAD 2009's Customize User Interface dialog box. Fer instance, to find the "About" command (alphabetically, the very first one), takes 13 seconds. It turns out every command takes 13 seconds on my computer running the shipping version of AutoCAD 2009.

The file being searched is named acad.cui and, optionally, other .cui files. They are in XML (ASCII) format and 2.7MB or less in size. It surprises me that text searches could take so long in this day of dual-core 2+GHz machines with multi-gigabytes of RAM.

Comments

[Windreaper]

The AutoCAD CUI Editor has quite a negative record in terms of speed.

Funnily, CUI files can be loaded and worked over at the fraction of that time in Bricscad on any machine, as I found out in my own benchmarkings.

Wind

[Steve Johnson]

Try typing "about" in the filter box instead. That involves no clicking and it finds the command almost instantly. Mind you, that's just about the only thing in CUI that is almost instant; the rest of it is slower than a wet week.

Caveat: that's my experience in 2009 Release Candidate. My shipping version hasn't arrived yet and we Australians aren't considered trustworthy enough to download it.

[Randall Newton]

Do you have Google Desktop Search installed? Try searching for it there -- I would be curious to see the time difference between the two products.

[ralphg]

I loaded the acad.cui file into Atlantis (the official word processor of upFront.eZine Publishing) and it found '_about in a slit second -- too short a time for me to start and stop the stopwatch.

What could AutoCAD be possibly be doing during those 13 seconds?

[Steve Johnson]

> What could AutoCAD be possibly be doing during those 13 seconds?

Teaching you patience. Did it work?

I have no idea how the CUI developers manage to extract such dreadful performance out of modern hardware. It must take a lot of effort. I guess they have had quite a bit of practice now and are getting the hang of it.

It reminds me of when AutoCAD 2006 was released and people were complaining on the Autodesk newsgroups about the 10-second wait for CUI to start up the first time (that's on 2005 hardware). The best one poor Autodesk guy could do to defend it was to state that it had been over 30 seconds during development. Big strides had been made! Sadly, not many people expressed gratitude.

[Tony Tanzillo]

I'm assuming you mean the 'Find and Replace' dialog that comes up when you click on the "Find or replace text" button ?

If that's the case, you may be misunderstanding what that function does. It doesn't find commands. It is a 'full text search' that scans everything, including descriptions; helpstrings; and so on, but it must do that through XML rather than by simply treating the contents of the CUI files as simple text (because things like XML tags and other XML structure, should not be searched).

Given a reasonable understanding of what's going on there, the initial delay is understandable because the entire XML of all CUI files being searched must be converted to a more easily searchable form and cached(and that cache is what's used subsequently).

You may also see a delay after modifying the CUI file's contents since doing that may invalidate the cached data and require it to be rebuilt.

If you only want to find a command, the filter textbox can do that quickly.