PCB Editor very sluggish

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I’ve recently upgraded to KiCAD 6.0.1 and have found the PCB editor extremely sluggish to the point of being unusable. The issue is as follows:

When a track is laid down close to another track kicad starts to eat 100% CPU and stalls the GUI. The GUI doesn’t completely freeze. Pressing ESC aborts the action after a few seconds. This happens even to extremely simple boards. And I can reproduce this on several different machines with completely different hardware.

I have attached a screencast of a quick demo including the board, the issue starts at 0:32, so feel free to fast-forward half a minute.

I doubt it’s hardware-related because it happens on three completely different computers. Maybe it’s related to my config. I honestly don’t know what to look for. I’ve already played with the “Interactive Router Settings”, to no avail.

KiCAD 5.1.12 which I’ve used before, didn’t have this issue. Any pointers appreciated.

Version: 6.0.1+dfsg-1~bpo11+1, release build

Debian 11.2
Linux linux-office 5.10.0-11-amd64
Intel(R) Xeon(R) E-2288G CPU @ 3.70GHz
16GiB RAM

kicad_sluggish.kicad_pcb (36.6 KB)
kicad_sluggish.kicad_sch (33.2 KB)

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I am running 6.0 nightly on both my 2014 Windows 10 office laptop with 8G RAM and my 2008 lab laptop with 2G (??) RAM and running Linux Mint. I am only viewing (not editing) KiCad in the lab, but I find that that machine gets excruciatingly slow while doing editing in LibreOffice (with KiCad and Firefox also running).

I will not say that it is a speed demon, but no problems when running in my 2014 Win10 Laptop with 8G RAM.

Your information suggests that even if I wanted to upgrade the RAM in my 2008 laptop it probably would not help much. (I do not want to sink $$ into that old computer.)

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Upgrade to 6.0.2 which was released on Sunday and has one fix that affects Linux distros performance in certain circumstances

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Ok, thanks for the info. I’ll have to wait until a 6.0.2 package is available for my distro.

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Turns out I may be mistaken about your particular problem, sorry :confused:

Actually a different fix for this potentially was never backported to 6.0.2

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Should I file a bug report then or wait until 6.0.2 is available in the repos and test that version in a few weeks?

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I see that 6.0.2 is already in Debian testing, so it might just take a few days until it’s available in the backports repo.

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Ok, I just tried it on a Debian testing machine. Same issue. 6.0.2 didn’t fix it.

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Could it be that the issue is caused by the arc (dxf bezier curve maybe) board border? Try temporarily replacing it with few straight segments and see if the issue reproduces.

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Sure, it could be. I tried to replace it with a rectangle and the issue doesn’t show up on the test board. But the issue isn’t always 100% present. Maybe it only manifests when a track is routed close to the board edge. But I don’t know.

I’ve created a bug report: PCB Editor very sluggish (#10881) · Issues · KiCad / KiCad Source Code / kicad · GitLab

If there’s anything else I can do, please let me know.

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