Kicad hangs when moving components in specific project

Software
1

There is this project that I made a year ago in kickad 7.0 under windows. I opened the project again in version 8.0.7 under linux, and noticed that on the PCB editor, after I move components that are connected to the GND plane, the program freezes for 3-5 seconds and then resumes. While the program is frozen, I can hear my laptop fans ramping up, and any action performed in this time period will be applied after the program unfreezes e.g. if I zoom in/out when it is frozen, when it resumes, it will perform the zoom. The freezing does not happen when I move components or vias that are not connected to the GND plane.
The same thing happens when using ctrl-z regardless of the undo action or the component to undo.
All of this does not happen on the schematic editor.

I tried disabling some heavy 3d models that this project contains but this did nothing. I also ran other projects (both mine and other’s) of similar or higher complexity and I couldn’t replicate this behavior. I also deleted fp-info-cache but it also didn’t help.

Probably something in this project causes this, and maybe some aspect of the GND plane. I don’t know any ways to debug this, or to somehow rebuild this project to be optimized for kicad 8. Could someone with better knowledge of Kicad have a look at the project to see what is wrong?

Here is a the project in question.

Application: KiCad x86_64 on x86_64

Version: 8.0.7-1.fc41, release build

Libraries:
	wxWidgets 3.2.6
	FreeType 2.13.3
	HarfBuzz 9.0.0
	FontConfig 2.15.0
	libcurl/8.9.1 OpenSSL/3.2.2 zlib/1.3.1.zlib-ng brotli/1.1.0 libidn2/2.3.7 libpsl/0.21.5 libssh/0.10.6/openssl/zlib nghttp2/1.62.1 OpenLDAP/2.6.8

Platform: Fedora Linux 41 (KDE Plasma), 64 bit, Little endian, wxGTK, X11, KDE, wayland
OpenGL: Intel, Mesa Intel(R) UHD Graphics 620 (KBL GT2), 4.6 (Compatibility Profile) Mesa 24.2.4

Build Info:
	Date: Dec  2 2024 00:00:00
	wxWidgets: 3.2.6 (wchar_t,wx containers) GTK+ 3.24
	Boost: 1.83.0
	OCC: 7.8.0
	Curl: 8.9.1
	ngspice: 43
	Compiler: GCC 14.2.1 with C++ ABI 1019

Build settings:
2

I can confirm that there is a lag, but for me it is very slight - approximately one second. I used KiCad 8.0.7 on Fedora Linux, AMD Threadripper Pro, X11, AMD Radeon Pro W6600.

1 Like
3

Have you tried not using wayland?

4

Yes, changed nothing

5

FIXED IT!!!
The project in question contained multiple designs under one PCB, each design physically separated from each other in order to score the PCB by hand. There is one large GND pour that the designs share. The issue was that this pour was split across the different designs into different planes. For some reason, this made something inside kicad work extra hard and freeze the entire program every time I interacted with something adjacent to GND.
To solve this, I had to connect each design’s GND plane with a wire like in the image:

Screenshot_20241215_185154
Screenshot_20241215_1851541169Ă—789 211 KB

6

KiCad is a one PCB one project concept.
You could have used GNDA, GNDB, GNDC etc to get rid of these jumpers

1 Like