Cheetah Slowing Down - Mouse Pointer Disappearing Often

Chris Heath

Chris Heath

0
Cheetah Slowing Down - Mouse Pointer Disappearing Often

Last week, for no reason Cheetah 3D became unresponsive for a few seconds at a time. Each time I tried to, e.g., move or scale a polygon or polygon object my mouse pointer would disappear and I'd have to wait three to five seconds for Cheetah to catch up.

At first I thought it might be the file, but it wasn't that complicated. I updated Cheetah to the latest version and things improved, but Cheetah still felt a bit sluggish. Today I'm starting a new model, and it's slowing down again. Even working with a simple polygon box object with nine polygons per side is getting difficult to work with. It's not like it's taxing my CPU, although for working on a simple box or moving its polygons, should it be using around 30% of the CPU?

And even at 30% CPU, should the mouse pointer be disappearing while it thinks about where to move a polygon?

I have no idea what could be slowing Cheetah down. I have restarted it, restarted the Late 2012 iMac 27 inch (It has 24 GB of memory and an 2.9 GHz Intel Core i5), and none of this makes any difference. I've closed other apps, there is tons of memory to spare.

I'm having to turn my job timer off, because I can't charge my client for the slowdown. Each time I release the mouse, the mousing pointer can disappear for three to five seconds. In fact it disappears before I release the mouse button.

Does anyone have any ideas for why Cheetah might be so laggy, and what I can try to get it running at full speed?
 
Hi Frank

Thanks for responding so quickly. It's Version El Capitan 10.11.3

Cheers

Chris
 

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I updated to 10.11.3 on the 22nd of January, so it's possible that the OS is the problem.

I updated Cheetah 3D (when I was getting frustrated with the lag) on the 29th.

Martin - Do you have another update coming shortly?

(I do have Cheetah running on a 2008 Macbook and Yosemite at home, so I may have to bring it into work and use that for now, but its so much better on the big iMac screen when it's running full speed)
 
Hi Chris,
so far I haven't received problem reports about OS X 10.11.3. But maybe the problem is just limited to a certain GPU. A simple scene with a box definitely shouldn't slow down Cheetah3D.

Do you have this problems with all tools or just with the transform tool. Do you also have this problem if you just rotate the camera around the box?

Bye
Martin
 
Hi Martin, yes it's across the board with all tools including panning and zooming the camera etc. It comes and goes, that is it will work fine for ten seconds, then progressively slows down or more correctly, stops for a few seconds to catch up. It feels like it's not keeping up with me most of the time.

Cheetah can sometimes feel this way (on the old 2008 laptop) when rendering with the CPU running at full capacity and modelling at the same time; but in this case I'm not rendering anything and I'm using the 2012 iMac.

Having said that, I've just opened Cheetah again for another look, (new file, + the files I was having problems with), and it's fine now. So now I'm stumped. If it happens again I'll let you know.

Thanks

Chris
 
Hi Chris,
that's really strange. Just minutes after I answered to your thread I had a quite similar experience in Safari. Every mouse click was followed by a 2-3 seconds beachball.:confused: Quitting and restarting Safari solved the problem. I never had that before.

Bye
Martin
 
I've been getting a lot of beachballs lately. I have El Capitan 10.11.3
Seems it happens no matter what app I'm using. I'll pay closer attention.
I have a lot of files on my desktop.

My Best
Jeanny
 
Hi Jeanny

Yes I'm beginning to suspect 10.11.3 as well, but I really have no clue. I recall when Cheetah 3D really slowed down last week, I was having problems with Safari. ( I also think I crashed Martin's web server the other day because it went down for a few minutes when I uploaded the 'About this Mac' screenshot above.)

I'm back using Cheetah today and having the same problem again.

The thing about Cheetah is I'm not seeing the spinning beach ball at all. The mouse pointer just takes three to five seconds (sometimes longer) to reappear. Then because Cheetah is not keeping up, when the mouse pointer does reappear, the polygon or object I'm moving jumps to a location that my mouse pointer passed over when things froze, but not where I left it when I released the mouse.

I've been doing test renders today, and rendering speed seems fine.
 
* Not related to C3D, but possibly connected:
* I have similar problems when using - as a designer - a couple of database applications (problems most likely since the El Cap update).
* Beachball as mentioned, crashes (often without any OSX dialogue at all), minor (?) damages to the structure such as orphan methods.
* As suggested by Chris and Jeanny, I suspect that OS X 10.11.3 is the culprit. Not very funny :frown:, as a matter of fact, very annoying :evil: :evil:
Servus from Vienna
 
* Some hasty research in my copious Biblical referential scrolls implies that the Mosaic quote, “an Apple a day keeps the Doctor away” has been mildly misinterpreted by the Hebrew scribes of the Pentateuch. Unfortunately, Adam´s original comments have been “lost in translation”. Mind you, the mention of our good Doctor Martin in such ancient and sacred documents indicates that He might have been involved in the very first models of the universe “as we know it”.
* Of course, they did not have Windows in Paradise or we would be really stuffed :rolleyes: :rolleyes:
Servus from Vienna
 
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