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I am using Cura version 5.9.0 and am having a problem where it is taking some of my models upwards of 4 hours to slice. Here is what the minimum standards are and what I am currently using on my laptop. This is happening on a lot of my models.

Minimum Standards:
OpenGL 2 compatible graphics card, OpenGL 4.1 for 3D layer view - (I have Core GL Version 4.6)
Display resolution 1024x768 - (I have 1920 x 1080)
Intel Core 2 or Athlon 64 - (I have Intel Celeron J4125 CPU)
550 Mb available hard disk space - (I currently have 237 Gb free)
4GM Ram Memory - )I have 7.83 GB usable)
 

Long Tail Fire Dragon.3mf

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    Your model has extreme amounts of detail. Might sound good, but in practice, models with just a smidge under 900,000 faces will take ages to slice, regardless of how powerful your machine is - it just took 14 minutes on my desktop, which might not sound like ages, but pretty much anything I ever print takes about 10 seconds.

     

    So let's talk about your hardware: just because you can run it doesn't mean you can run it well. You really need to temper your expectations. With any slice, not just this one. The J4125 is a five year old, ultra low voltage processor designed for very low end hardware or embedded systems. It's quad core, runs at 2GHz and is designed to use 10W of power at most.

    Your RAM - you might have 8GB, but how much of that is already taken up by your OS and other programs? Probably half of it, if not more. Right now for me just having Cura with the model open is taking up 1.2GB by itself (and that won't go down while you're slicing since that's handled by a separate process). CuraEngine (doing the actual slicing) is taking up another 1.4GB. Needless to say, your system is almost certainly "swapping" - using your main storage, which I'm guessing by your specs is either a hard drive or eMMC (basically an SD card attached to the motherboard) - both are ridiculously slow compared to RAM - as extra RAM (called virtual memory). This slows things down considerably.

     

    The solution:

    Your model needs to be simplified (or decimated, to use the technical term for the way it's usually done) so it's maybe a tenth of that. You're not going to notice a difference in the quality of your print.

     

    If you're running Windows, Microsoft's 3D Builder app can do that (it's also great at fixing broken models, should that ever come up). Other programs... I'm not sure if Meshmixer can do it. MeshLab can do it, but it's far from intuitive.

     

    If you're wondering what hardware it takes to do it in 14 minutes, an i5-14600K with a total of 14 cores, although Cura will never use all of them, but it means other programs can run on their own cores and not interrupt CuraEngine, base frequency of 3.5GHz going up to 5.3GHz if the workload requires it and it's not running too hot - and it can get the required power (base power is 125W, peaking at 181W), and 64GB of RAM (I've never been able to use all of it, except when deliberately trying to, so I don't even have virtual memory turned on). My storage isn't so important (just affects how long it takes Cura to load the file, since I'm not using it for virtual memory) but for what it's worth, it's an M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 SSD. Whatever storage your computer has - and is probably using for virtual memory - is going to be completely left in the dust by this (and it's far from the fastest drive available).

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