Comment 20 for bug 1851574

Hi,

We spent the best part of yesterday seeing whether we could isolate it to some footprints, and I think we have. However, they all seem fairly simple. Moreover, we thought we had previously isolated it to a certain footprint, but when we went back and removed that footprint, it still caused an error.

Last night, before I left, I deleted the footprint files of the most used SMD footprints - the 0201/0402/0603 lands that make up over 90% of footprints used on our board.

When I came in this morning, it seemed to have worked. This is a bit unusual because all these footprints appear to be relatively standard. I'm working on further bisecting if this is caused by a specific footprint, and, if so, which one.

Having said that, we're pretty sure that there have been a couple of occasions in which we had those footprints in our design, and it still worked: it just so happened that it worked once, immediately after we updated all the schematic symbols.

I'm not at all sure whether this is possible, but could this issue be caused by the quantity of footprints? I noticed that that when committing the change, you're also creating an undo entry;

#14 0x00007fffc1725102 in BOARD_COMMIT::Push(wxString const&, bool, bool) (this=0x55559155cfc8, aMessage=..., aCreateUndoEntry=true, aSetDirtyBit=true)

We're not able to use pcbnew when selecting or moving large, complex (lots of traces across many layers, with lots of vias and components), without it becoming ridiculously slow for around 30-300s (depending on how much we're selecting and what we're trying to do). If you try to stop or undo the process it sometimes (infrequently) just crashes - you're better off waiting the 5min for it to finish. Speaking very, very, qualitatively, Kicad is similarly slow when updating footprints; it usually takes us around 10-30 minutes.

Is it somehow possible that the cause of this problem isn't due to any specific footprint, but rather the number of them?

I've gotten the number of candidate footprints down to 9 - I'll continue bisecting them and I'll let you know what I find out.