El Capitan performance

[cgrejsen 0]

I apologize if this topic has been addressed previously and maybe El Capitan is not supported.

For me Cura 3.5, 3.6 Beta and 3.6 perform excruciatingly slowly with El Capitan on my iMac i3 3.06GHz, 12GB RAM and SSD. Unuseable except for very basic functionality, like "load model", and "Prepare". Almost every interaction pegs the cpu at 100% +, sometimes for minutes.  Keystrokes and mouse clicks appear to take about a second to register before any feedback, and attempting to scroll through profile settings is a daunting operation with the program at times becoming entirely unresponsive, requiring a Forced Quit and restart.

For my own curiosity I installed Cura 3.6 on a Surface Pro II w/4GB RAM running Windows 10. The program performance is fast and responsive is immediate.

 

I am curious if others are seeing the performance issue on El Capitan, and if anyone has any tuning recommendations (besides upgrading my hardware ...).

 

[Smithy 1,141]

You cannot really compare your iMac with the Surface Pro, your iMac has only an i3 cpu which is often on its limit by just surfing the web. Memory is not all you need for Cura, it's cpu and a good dedicated gpu.

[cgrejsen 0]

While we agree the i3 540 at 3.06GHz is not exactly state of the art, I am not sure it is significantly slower than the i5 4300U at 1.9GHz  in the Surface Pro II. Both are old, both have two cores, and the i3 has more cache, but hey I could be wrong on that :-) 

I suspect Cura uncovers a race condition in El Capitan pegging the cpu, but I could be wrong on that too...

[Smithy 1,141]

You could try to uninstall Cura and delete everything in der Library/Application Support/cura. There are all configurations, also from older versions. Beware that you will lose your profiles, so save them first or backup the folder before deletion. With this action, you could try if a really fresh installation of Cura runs better.

 

It is not always hardware, because there are also some people who have problems with brand new Macbook Pros and the latest MacOS. 

 

I found out that memory is not the trigger for Cura to make it more performant. My Macbook Pro 2018 has 8GB and i5, and Cura runs ok, not the fastest software but useable. In my office, I have an iMac i5 with 24GB memory, and Cura is not quicker. So I guess Cura needs GPU power, and maybe an i7 would help, but it will never be as fast as a native MacOS application because it is built to run on multi-platforms.

[cgrejsen 0]

Earlier today I did a re-installation of Cura 3.6 after wiping out all remnants of the previous installation and performance is unchanged. I am beginning to wonder if the abysmal performance is related to Apple's discontinued support of OpenGL.

As a distraction I installed Cura 3.6 on an old Fujitsu T5010  notebook with a dual core P8600 and 4 gb RAM running Linux and found the Cura user interface to be snappier than the iMac ... so maybe Open Source Linux has better OpenGL support.

 

I really like how Cura works on my Surface Pro II so that system will be commissioned for future slicing. Pity the screen is so tiny..

 

[Smithy 1,141]

5 hours ago, cgrejsen said:

I am beginning to wonder if the abysmal performance is related to Apple's discontinued support of OpenGL.

Yes, could be the reason. I have similar performance problems with Fusion360, it is sometimes unusable on my Macbook and Fusion also relies on OpenGL as far as I know. On the other side, my "old" Macbook Pro i7 with 16GB Ram and Mojave MacOS is running fine with Fusion.