SketchUp is suddenly very slow

Well, SketchUp 2017 Make hasn’t changed in several years so it’s not SketchUp to blame. Could be some component(s) in your model or textures or your graphics drivers or maybe some extension you installed.

I recently upgraded my laptop (which was a gaming laptop) to the fastest one I could get (i9-9900k w/GTX2080) and I once in a while, get some anomalies within my projects, despite them being much less complicated. I could hypothesize that one of the reasons for performance issues is the usage of gaming cards as opposed to production cards. I did a lot of research on this before purchasing my new laptop and found that it’s hard to strike a balance between the two (gaming vs. production) if you have a need to do both on one machine. Production cards to a much better job with 3D modelling but not so great in the gaming arena and vice versa can hold true for gaming cards. I do get a bit better performance from the RTX card than I did with the 1080 (before it gave me problems), when it comes to rendering with VRay, and I do know that Chaos Groups working to optimize VRay for the RTX, but in general, for SU, it boils down to ‘best practices’ when modelling. I while back, I started to work harder at ‘solid modelling’, ensuring that everything I modeled were solids, making it easier for SU to process and display, as opposed to orphaned surfaces and stray lines, which i do know can tax the system.

2 Likes

Agreed, maybe something was wrong with the project. I started again from scratch and wasn’t able to replicate the bug. I guess it’s these days again. Thanks for help.

If I may, I’ve come across some anomalous activity with models in SU, that I’ve gone as far as to creating a blank SU file and importing the offending model into it (which of course has become a singular component), and then slowly and meticulously picking out parts, and manually auditing them to ensure a proper build. It may take a while, but ultimately, I’ve seen dramatic reduction in file size and much better stability. This could help in your case, and if your model is rather complex, you could follow the same procedure, but just pick a section of that model, audit it and clean it up, save what you have and then create another new blank SU model, import the original again, pick out a new section, audit…wash, rinse and repeat.

1 Like

Hi everyone,
I’m new to the forum and I’m and IT guy not a designer.
We are experiencing some issues with SketchUp Pro 2019 on a Fujitsu CELSIUS J550/2 with a Intel Xeon E3-1275 v6 16 Gb RAM SSD 240 Gb and a Nvidia Quadro P1000.
It’s very slow on opening a 236 Mb .skp.
What can I do since my knowledge of SketchUp is hear-say…
Many thanks in advance.

I’m guessing the culprit could also be:
View menu: Shadows off / shadows on.
For me, that’s the difference between beautiful fluid motion and a clunky unusable model that lags 10 seconds behind what I do with the mouse.

1 Like

Thanks for your replay. I’m also have same issue with Sketchup 2017 Pro but on PC with Intel Xeon E5-2683 v3 32GB TAM SSD 240 GB and Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti (Win 10) . It’s slow even on a small files (~3 MB) and it seems to be more laggy after some time when working with groups - each edit group" command freezes Sketchup for a second or two. I don’t know if that is not a problem caused by the additional plugins - nobody wrote about what it is installed with their Sketchup

1 Like

I’ve been having the same problem. The file size on my model is 523MB. From the information on this thread, I see this is a problem. I brought up Window/Model Info. Which permitted me to invoke “purge unused components” which seemed to help significantly. But still I have a few components with tens of thousands of instances. These have names like leaf, etc. So it pretty strongly suggests I need to find replacements for these components. These are sub components of other components I haven’t seen before. Is there an easy way to find which top level components contain the constituent component?

I had hoped that by just hiding the offending top level component on either the layers or object model I could suppress the cost of rending these offending components. Then I could suppress the offending components, mess around with my model, and just turn them one at the end for a final rendering. But it seems the hiding the components doesn’t speed things up. So any advice appreciated.

This is where Outliner can come in handy. Expand all the upper level components and search for the lower level one.

Instead of hiding components, assign layers to them and turn off the layer visibility. That may help. Another thing that can help performance big time is to use a face style without materials. Best performance is probably going to be with the Hidden Line face style but Monochrome is probably easier and certainly makes it easier to stay on top of reversed faces. Also turn off Profiles in the edge settings since they also make work for the graphics card.

I have SU 2016 - but from what I see above this affliction also ails later versions.
my model is tiny:
image
the file is 292M, and I still experience horrible lags and time outs.
we do a copy of a piece of furniture, and SU goes into “think mode” and only comes back
out after some 30 seconds. even if the item isn’t very large.
we have 16G ram, but the program only seem to be using about 2G of it.

I am not sure is making this experience so bad, and it didn’t use to be so.
thanks muchly
-gil

That would be a lot of it.

I will try with clean small file and see if get the command dropouts…
thanks

FWIW, 292 Mb is not a tiny file.

Have you tried purging the unused stuff from the model? Maybe you could share the .skp file so we can compare the performance we get.

What is the graphics card?

2346827 edges and 1428269 faces will bring most computers to a crawl! Do you have imported decorative elements from the 3D Warehouse? Many of them are very “heavy”.

1 Like

If you want to see which components or groups have the most edges, try Steve’s own Statistics Probe extension from the SketchUcation Plugin Store.

https://sketchucation.com/pluginstore?pln=SB_Statistics_Probe

Can’t get the link to work properly in the forum. Copy the text above into a browser to find the extension.

Models the size of yours will run slowly on even the fastest computer, and you’ll have to ‘lighten it’ to get it to run at acceptable speed.

Use scenes and tags to turn off visibility of elements you don’t need to see in that scene.

Delete and purge some of the heaviest components (in terms of how many edges they have). Foliage and plants in particular are frequently culprits, and furniture components (especially soft contoured furniture, cushions and pillows) often are too.

Replace them with other 3D Warehouse models found using ‘low poly’ either as a search term, or use filters to limit file size and polygon count.

Components made using FollowMe with too many segments in arcs and circles are another source of excessive geometry, and some manufacturers’ models are simply exported from overdetailed CAD models - for example, showing interior shelves, motor, compressor etc. for a refrigerator, all in excruciating detail.

Really enjoyed this thread. My takeaway is that single threaded CPU performance is king when it comes to CAD HW dependency. Is there a workflow training session available for optimizing models for performance? I am an novice-intermediate user capable of creating what I need, but I have a tendency to focus on the details and my models perform very slowly in Sketchup Pro 2021. This question is not about the details of any specific model, but more an inquiry about model performance tuning best practices.

Agile SketchUp Modeling Guide.pdf (1,5 MB)

There are some general things I teach my students regarding keeping models clean and light. Some of those are listed below.

Consider how the model will be used and choose the level of detail based on that. Don’t add any more detail than is needed to communicate what you need to say. Don’t add small details that won’t be visible anyhow.

Keep entity counts low where possible. A round table table top might need more than 24 sides but a round table leg probably doesn’t (and might not even need 24 sides).

Work to keep components and groups showing as solids. These will be cleaner and easier to work with than non-solids.

Keep face orientations correct as you go.

Purge unused stuff frequently. Don’t let unused components and materials accumulate.

In general keep up on the cleaning as you go along.

Don’t use extremely high res images for textures. SketchUp will not show them as high res but the original image files will load the model file and slow things down. Also consider that you may not really need textures at all. Very often simple colors will do the job just fine.

It’s not clear what your graphics card is but that can often be a bottleneck. Leaving materials to late in the project can help reduce the load on the GPU. Also leave shadows turned off and use a “fast” style for modeling.

1 Like

I just went through this madness. Newer workstation, NVIDIA Quatro T1000 graphic card, slooooow Sketchup. It wouldn’t even render shadows. After trying many things, these are the settings that I landed on - it made a HUGE difference. I can move around in my model quickly, and shadows are almost instantaneous.