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configurable hardware resources for QCAD

Posted: Sat Feb 21, 2009 2:29 am
by arborhelp
Hi, I've been using QCAD for a little while now and find that it fills a vital hole in the Linux comunity for CAD. There are couple of other CAD apps for Linux, but I'm not prepared to shell out £400+ just to see how well they work.
I have noticed that when Architects send me their .dwg and I convert them to .dxf, qcad slows right down - horribly so sometimes.
From other posts this seems to be a problem for files over a certain complexity. Could you possibly provide an interface that could configure the amount of hardware resources to be dedicated to QCAD - like how much RAM to be used and how many cpus etc.. GIMP has a similar interface that lets you configure how much memory you can use for images and tiles etc..
Would that be a workaround to the slowdown of the app. or would it make no difference?
Also, is there any chance you'll be supporting natively .dwg files.
I really wouldn't mind spending more cash on the product if it meant overcoming the slowdown issues and the dwg games. Judging from the searches I've made online there are a ton of others that are waiting for just such an app.
And one other thing, is there any chance you'll be bringing out version that runs natively on a 64bit OS instead of going through IA32-libs?
Certainly I very much appreciate what you've done for CAD on Linux to date.

Posted: Fri Apr 03, 2009 10:47 am
by onetmt
I too have just purchased the professional edition, and I can see a considerable slowdown in performance with respect to the community edition, compiled natively for amd64 architecture.

Re: configurable hardware resources for QCAD

Posted: Fri Apr 03, 2009 11:26 am
by andrew
arborhelp wrote: Would that be a workaround to the slowdown of the app. or would it make no difference?
It would not make any difference. Memory usage of CAD is different (more dynamic) than memory usage of bitmap applications like Gimp. QCAD 3 will address performance issues.
arborhelp wrote: Also, is there any chance you'll be supporting natively .dwg files.
Yes, QCAD 3 will fully support all DXF / DWG flavors (OpenDesign libs).
arborhelp wrote: And one other thing, is there any chance you'll be bringing out version that runs natively on a 64bit OS instead of going through IA32-libs?
That might also happen for QCAD 3.

Posted: Fri Apr 03, 2009 8:18 pm
by arborhelp
Thank you very much for your reply - good news indeed! :D

Do you have any release dates in mind? Would you consider releasing an alpha version for testing, especially if you're going to support different architectures natively?
If this is of interest to you, I would be happy to contribute some of my computers time for testing.