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Orcad Capture performance

Cantstandya

Hi all,

In my company we are more and more struggling with bad Orcad Capture performance on our PCs. Capture becomes laggy when wiring and takes long time to boot. This affects indirecly our product quality as we are constanly distracted by the lagging. Boot time is around 2 minutes with license selection window popping up. Booting is a bit quicker when having selected default license suite earlier, but still boot can take around 1 minute.

Opening a ~15MB DSN file at home through VPN from a network drive at work is impossible. Then Capture lags for 5 minutes and the capture.exe process is not responding according to the task manager. A 15MB file should be fairly easy to handle these days - unless the SW is poorly written or something.

It seems to me that Orcad Capture is affecting the multitasking performance of Windows. Sometimes when Capture is lagging some other programs are lagging/hanging as well. Could there be som old 16/32 bit drivers in Capture messing up the Windows multitasking? Actually Capture is hanging right now and the Notpad++ program I am drafting this post in is also lagging(!). They are greyed out, showing not responding in Task manager and I get a spinning mouse wheel.

Our PCs seems to get more and more laggy the longer since last PC reboot. This could be due to the PC itself. Not sure if this is due to Capture. Maybe a combination. A PC reboot makes the performace normally a bit better.

We are running Lenovo X1 Gen9 16GB RAM. We are not hitting the roof on disk, memory or CPU at all. But it seems to be something in the background that messes stuff up.

We are running 17.4 hotfix 37. I just tried 23.1 now, but no noticable improvement.

We have tried to disable all autoloading tcl files, but doesnt seem to improve the performance.

There seems to be some suspended capture.exe processes piling up in the task manager. I am not able to kill them. Right now I have five. Could this be a symptom of something?

Someone else struggling with this?

  • 0

    Check that you meet minimum graphics requirements. A dedicated graphics card is always best since motherboard based solutions frequently share memory with the slower CPU RAM. In addition, verify that your graphics driver software is up to date.

    Also, you can set system environment variable CDS_LIC_ONLY=1, so that it takes less time to fetch the license while invoking the tool.

    In order improve the performance, you can also try following:

    1. Disble ITC.

    In Capture: Options >> Preferences >> Miscellaneous >> Intertool Communication >> Uncheck "Enable Intertool Communication"

    2. Delete/Rename ini.

    Close Capture

    Go to %Home%\cdssetup\OrCAD_Capture\17.4.0 folder and rename Capture.ini as

    Capture_orig.ini

    invoke Capture and see the results

    3. Autoback-up's directory points to local drive

    4. Close Capture.

    On Desktop: Right click on screen >> Properties >> Settings >> Advanced >> Troubleshooting. Make Hardware acceleration as "NONE"

    invoke Capture and see the results

    5. Close Capture.

    Open Control Panel >> System >> Properties >> Advanced >> Performance

    Options -> Settings >> Visual Effects >> "Adjust for best performance".

    invoke Capture and see the results

    6. Close Capture

    Check that Virtual Memory is appropriate.

    Open Control Panel >> System >> Properties >> Advanced >> Performance

    Options -> Settings >> Advanced >> Virtual Memory -> Change.

    invoke Capture and see the results.

    Hope it helps.

  • 0

    We are also struggling a bit with the performance of Capture CIS, especially since the 17.4 release. Version 16.6 was much faster. I know it it recommended to have a graphic card, but our machines to not have it.

    Regarding the license: I also have to wait for roughly 15 seconds after starting capture until the license selection window pops up. I monitored the network traffic and If I am right, I think capture also connects to the licence server again from time to time to check the license again. In my opinion, this could be a reason why capture is lagging from time to time. 

  • 0 in reply to rg13

    Thanks a lot for suggestions! I will check them as well. I will write a new answer in this thread to describe other things I have discovered.

  • 0

    I have done some more checking and to me it seems that the issue in general is disk accesses. We are typically running across VPN from home to a network drive with the DSN on it. The VPN connection has a latency of around 50ms. Capture seems to more or less hang for all disk accesses. So during saving/autobackup we experience lag/hanging. Due to this we are now working with DSN files locally on C:. This improves things a lot.

    One thing I see is that Capture is accessing the reports file that I have in my project very often. Capture can go from really responsive to almost constant hang when having 3-4 reports files attached to my project(BOM, DRC files etc). Looking into Wireshark I see that Capture accesses these files(SMB2 packets over VPN to network drive) almost constantly when I do various stuff in Capture. So when Capture seems to hang for each disk access these accesses slows down performance a lot. I think also these accesses slightly slows down wiring in Capture when working on a DSN on local C: drive, which could be very annoying.

  • 0

    Online DRC seems to be a huge performance killer when editing schematics. OrCAD gets worse every year.

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