hanging on save - building workspace?

Question

Recently I've encountered a pop-up window that shows a list of tasks akin to the progress window (screenshot attached). It sometimes appears after I save all. It says:The user operation is waiting for "Building workspace" to complete.

Once this appears, a few seconds later the free memory ( the java memory side) drops and I get the purge memory question.  After that, the progress bar doesn't move, though the windows task manager shows my CPU maxed out by CE. The only way out is to end the process.

I'm not working with a particularly large scene (<8mb) or building complex 3D geometry; I am working with several cga files that pass back and forth a few dozen attributes (didn't notice the issue before I created that cga).

64-bit CE, 8GB of RAM...

Is this a is a memory issue or a matter of rebuilding the workspace?

hang.png

MatthiasBuehler1 · Answer

Hi !

Would it be possible for you to narrow this down on your project so you can successfully reproduce it on a minimal project and then send to me (data treated confidentially) ?

We can only track down any bugs if we can successfully reproduce it here in the office. 😞

[ As small as possible project would be nice of course .. ]

Please let me know ..

Matt

ChristianGass1 · Answer

I thought maybe the workspace was corrupted (I created it over 2 years ago with 2010.3), so I re-installed CE and created a new workspace. I imported the old project into the new workspace, opened it up, and it the memory dropped from 1700 to 140 and hung while loading the scene.

I only noticed this happening after developing a cga that uses a lot of parameters from an imported rule, like this:
import iR: importedRule.cga
iR.rule(attr1, attr2... attr36) --> nextRule(attr1, attr2... attr36)

If I comment out the rule (in a text editor outside CE) and and then restart CE, the scene loads up without issue. If I un-comment the rule while in CityEngine, I will be able to work with the scene for some time, but then the window I described appears unpredictably upon a random save.

That's really the only thing I can think of that I've done out of the ordinary since this started happening.

Any insight appreciated.

MatthiasBuehler1 · Answer

Hi !

We're aware of this, but I've never been able to actually reproduce the specific issue.

If you can successfully reproduce this everytime you start, that may be helpful to track the issue further down.

Let me know ..

m.