Occasional Freezes of KiCAD After Closing Program Windows

[Andrey Kuznetsov]

I've been noticing that KiCad would freeze for 5-10 secs, specifically after I would close programs like eeschema or pcbnew. Clicking on the main KiCad app would not bring it forward. It's not reproducible 100%, but it happens about 50% of the time, even on bare bones projects like 2 vias on a PCB.

I'm thinking some housekeeping item is locking up KiCad GUI and preventing it from showing up until it's done.

Application: Pcbnew
Version: (5.1.2-194-gf11d95044)-1, release build
Libraries:
    wxWidgets 3.0.4
    libcurl/7.61.1 OpenSSL/1.1.1 (WinSSL) zlib/1.2.11 brotli/1.0.6 libidn2/2.0.5 libpsl/0.20.2 (+libidn2/2.0.5) nghttp2/1.34.0
Platform: Windows 8 (build 9200), 64-bit edition, 64 bit, Little endian, wxMSW
Build Info:
    wxWidgets: 3.0.4 (wchar_t,wx containers,compatible with 2.8)
    Boost: 1.68.0
    OpenCASCADE Community Edition: 6.9.1
    Curl: 7.61.1
    Compiler: GCC 8.2.0 with C++ ABI 1013

Build settings:
    USE_WX_GRAPHICS_CONTEXT=OFF
    USE_WX_OVERLAY=OFF
    KICAD_SCRIPTING=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_MODULES=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_PYTHON3=OFF
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON_PHOENIX=OFF
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_ACTION_MENU=ON
    BUILD_GITHUB_PLUGIN=ON
    KICAD_USE_OCE=ON
    KICAD_USE_OCC=OFF
    KICAD_SPICE=ON

[Michael Kavanagh (michaelkavanagh)]

Is there a specific set of steps to reliably reproduce this?

[Andrey Kuznetsov (kandrey89)]

I tracked the issue down to "fp-info-cache" file being generated after I close pcbnew.
Issue only occurs with projects located on networked drives. My speed to this drive is 5MB/s, it's located in my house on a file system. The tmp cache is created with 1MB initially, then it crawls at 100kb/s, then jumps to 2MB and crawls again to ~2.6MB/s, for a total of ~10secs.
While the "fp-***.tmp" is being generated, the main app is frozen.

[Wayne Stambaugh (stambaughw)]

@Jeff, any thoughts on this bug? On windows network shares, would it make sense to just create a temporary cache file on the local hard drive. I know this would require rebuilding the cache every time footprints are required but it would prevent this issue. Has anyone tested this on linux and/or macos?

[Andrey Kuznetsov (kandrey89)]

Doesn't happen on macOS with project located on smb NAS wired connection:
Application: kicad
Version: (5.1.2-1)-1, release build
Libraries:
    wxWidgets 3.0.4
    libcurl/7.54.0 LibreSSL/2.6.5 zlib/1.2.11 nghttp2/1.24.1
Platform: Mac OS X (Darwin 18.6.0 x86_64), 64 bit, Little endian, wxMac
Build Info:
    wxWidgets: 3.0.4 (UTF-8,STL containers,compatible with 2.8)
    Boost: 1.69.0
    OpenCASCADE Community Edition: 6.9.1
    Curl: 7.54.0
    Compiler: Clang 9.0.0 with C++ ABI 1002

Build settings:
    USE_WX_GRAPHICS_CONTEXT=ON
    USE_WX_OVERLAY=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_MODULES=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_PYTHON3=OFF
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON_PHOENIX=OFF
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_ACTION_MENU=ON
    BUILD_GITHUB_PLUGIN=ON
    KICAD_USE_OCE=ON
    KICAD_USE_OCC=OFF
    KICAD_SPICE=ON

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for KiCad because there has been no activity for 60 days.]