Long Load Times for ShapeDiver Configurator in Australia & NZ

Grasshopper ShapeDiver
1

Hello ShapeDiver Community,

I’ve encountered a peculiar issue with my ShapeDiver configurator that I hope to get some assistance with. The configurator has been functioning well, but for the past two months, I’ve noticed significantly longer load times for the initial geometry and parameter changes, but this issue seems to be localized specifically to Australia and new Zealand.

Issue Details:

  • Problem Description: The initial load of the geometry and any subsequent changes to parameters take an unusually long time to process, ranging from 2-3 minutes.
  • Geographical Specificity: This problem is unique to users accessing the configurator from Australia. When accessed from other locations (e.g., the USA, Colombia, and Spain), the configurator loads and responds within a reasonable timeframe of 10-20 seconds.
  • Timeframe: The issue has been persistent for the last two months.

Troubleshooting Done:

  1. Multiple Locations Testing: To isolate the issue, I’ve tested the model’s performance from various global locations, confirming that the delay is specific to Australia.
  2. Internet Speed and Connectivity: Preliminary checks on internet speed and connectivity in Australia were conducted to ensure the problem wasn’t on the user end.

Request for Assistance:

I’m looking for guidance or solutions that could help address this geographically specific lag. Any insights on whether this could be related to ShapeDiver’s CDN, server locations, or perhaps specific configurations within my model that might exacerbate latency issues in certain regions would be greatly appreciated.

Additional Information:

  • I am open to suggestions on tools or methods to further diagnose this issue.
  • If there are recommended practices for optimizing model performance across different geographies, please share.

Thank you in advance for your time and help. Any insights or suggestions to mitigate this issue would be incredibly helpful.

2

Many thanks for your summary Juan. I reviewed the model you linked to. My observation: The CDN feature is not enabled for the account owning this model. The subscription of the account would need to be upgraded from PRO to Designer Plus to include the CDN feature.

Please note that without using the CDN feature, all the traffic has to flow directly to the data center in Frankfurt where the shared system the account is using is hosted. There are of course lots of factors that influence the roundtrip and data transfer speed for connections from Australia to Frankfurt.

I also reviewed the computation log of the model, it looks normal. In general computation speed of the model can not explain geographic differences in loading time of the model. Slow computations would be noticeable from all geographic locations.

I strongly recommend upgrading the account to use the CDN feature, especially if lots of users access the configurator from Australia.

Please note that models uploaded before August 2022 will need to be re-uploaded for them to support the CDN feature. That means the following needs to be done to activate the CDN for these models:

  1. Upgrade the account to include the CDN feature.
  2. Newly upload the models uploaded before August 2022.

Please let me know in case you have any further questions.

3

@Juan_Acosta if you prefer to continue the conversation in person, you could join one of the weekly onboarding sessions. We started to offer these sessions for customers with an active subscription, you can find the registration link on the dashboard.