Ultiboard became extremely slow

[DrPR]

I was working on a design with no problems. This was an existing layout that needed a few modifications.

Suddenly Multisim appeared to stop working. But it hadn't - it just takes about a minute for every operation to take place.

Click on a part and wait about a minute for it to be selected.

Right click and wait about a minute for the pop-up menu to appear.

Open a dialog and click on a tab, and wait about a minute for the new dialog to open.

Even trying to edit component footprints in the component editor resulted in about a minute delay for every operation.

Basically, the program became unuseable.

Aha!

I was experiencing short but annoying delays trying to move parts on a layer with a copper pour (ground plane). I changed the "Copper Area Properties/Copper Area/Fillstyle" to outline (the top entry in the pull down list that looks like an unfilled rectangle).

That was the cause of the problem.

I turned off running DRC and that didn't help.

Switching back to a solid Fillstyle caused the program to start running normally again.

This has to be a BUG!

PRH

[_user32]

PRH,

What version of the software are you using? In v12 of Ultiboard polygon shapes were restructured to work more efficiently.

Pat N

[DrPR]

V11.0

[_user32]

PRH,

Send me a private message as v12 has a better polygon implementation.

- Pat N

[DrPR]

I downloaded V12 but there is no way I am going to change from V11!

When I started usng V11 I was working on revisions to an earlier design that had been created by someone else. Every time I made a change Ultiboard would rip up some or all of the components. Just adding two resistors to the design resulted in nearly all components being ripped off the board. What should have taken 15 minutes to do resulted in a complete new board layout.

It took six weeks to get someone from NI to explain the problem - the morons who created these programs deliberately made later versions incompatible with files from earlier versions! Only idiots would make it impossible to make minor upgrades to large complex existing designs! V11 was incompatible with the V8 files I had to work with. I had to redo six very large and complex boards - it took months!

So, with morons like that in charge of NI software development, there is no way I am going to upgrade from V11! And I will never use NI software for any new projects.

PRH

PS: I have created about 320 PC board designs (not counting numerous revisions to existing designs over the years) using many different PCB design packages. Multisim is about the worst schematic capture program I have seen (but not as bad as OrCRUD). Ultiboard is OK, but is severly hampered by the lame library management routines it shares with Multisim. Overall, the whole package sucks!