Tag Archives: Bloatware

Bloatware – a tale of two installations

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In a previous post, I showed that AutoCAD is bloatware by comparing the size of its downloads to that of BricsCAD. Obviously, an application that’s ten times the size it should be is going to cost you a lot of unnecessary bandwidth, download time and drive space. But maybe you don’t care about that. What practical difference does it make?

Well, for one thing, the blimping-out of Autodesk’s former flagship product has a big effect on installation time. Vast and ever-increasing amounts of time are wasted by users of Autodesk products, just waiting for the things to finish installing. But isn’t this just the inevitable price to pay for the functionality provided?

No. Again, BricsCAD proves it.

The installation comparison is shown below. These installations were performed on a mid-range Windows 10 i7 PC with 8 GB RAM. The downloaded files were executed from a local hard drive and the applications were installed to a local SSD. If I needed to enter information manually, I stopped the clock while that was going on. Times are the total elapsed time from commencement in minutes and seconds. More user input was required for the AutoCAD install, but that has not been counted in this comparison. That is, by eliminating the human input stages I’m being kind to Autodesk.

I performed a complete default installation of BricsCAD. In the case of AutoCAD, I turned off the installation of Recap and A360 Desktop to make for a fair comparison, as equivalents are not part of the BricsCAD install and those components are not required by the average CAD user. Everything else was as per default settings.

BricsCAD V17.2 64-bit Windows Installation
Installation Operation
 Timestamp
Execute BricsCAD-V17.2.03-1-en_US(x64).msi 0:00
Prompt for questions 0:03
Click Yes for UAC Allow 0:14
Installation complete, start application 0:35
First run startup 0:40
Total time from install to ready to draw
 0:40 (100%)

That’s astonishingly fast. Remember, this is an application that is more capable than AutoCAD overall. How does installing AutoCAD itself compare?

Equivalent AutoCAD 2018 64-bit Windows Installation
Installation Operation
 Timestamp
Execute AutoCAD_2018_English_Win_64bit_dlm_001_002.sfx.exe 0:00
Self-extractor finishes initializing 2:46
Self-extractor finishes extracting, click Yes for UAC Allow 4:56
Install screen appears, answer questions, start install proper 5:04
Desktop icon appears 8:10
Install complete, restart required 10:21
Restart complete, start application 11:41
Activation begins 12:05
Activation complete 12:21
Close AutoCAD, execute AutoCAD_2018_Product_Help_English_Win_32_64bit_dlm.sfx.exe 12:25
Self-extractor finishes initializing 14:44
Self-extractor finishes extracting, click Yes for UAC Allow 14:54
Install screen appears, answer questions, start install proper 14:57
Offline Help installation complete, execute AutoCAD_2018.0.1_64bit_r2.exe 15:44
2018.0.1 install complete, start AutoCAD 16:50
Second startup complete 17:18
Total time from install to ready to draw
 17:18 (2595%)

Installed sizes are roughly 0.5 GB for BricsCAD and 2.4 GB for AutoCAD. It’s hard to be exact because Autodesk likes to perform multiple installs when one is requested and tends to squirrel away various components in a variety of places. Here are the ten(!) new entries in Add or Remove Programs after just the first stage of the AutoCAD install:

OK, so maybe AutoCAD takes 26 times as long as BricsCAD to install. But the AutoCAD installation images are so much prettier than the plain old BricsCAD dialogs! Shall we call it a draw?

No.

Autodesk, you took a real pounding here. Bricsys chewed you up, spat you out, ground the chewings into the dust, set fire to the remains and then put out the fire with bodily fluids. Sorry, but you deserve it. Your installations have been ridiculously slow for years and are getting worse. Installing a vertical product or suite is beyond a joke; it makes even the AutoCAD install look speedy. It’s not good enough.

Autodesk updates Design Review

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Despite the previously announced end-of-active-life for Design Review (Autodesk’s DWF viewer), there is now a new release available. This wasn’t supposed to happen, because we should all now be using cloud-based solutions.

A new version of DWG TrueView was needed to deal with the new DWG 2018 format, and one knock-on effect is that a new Design Review was needed to be compatible with DWG TrueView 2018.  It’s still only 32-bit, so it appears to be a matter of Autodesk just touching it up enough to keep it compatible.

Interestingly, the new Design Review is not called 2018. Here’s where to find it:

On the bloatware theme, if there’s a particular reason this download (421 MB) is over eight times the size of its predecessor (49 MB), it’s not readily apparent.  The installed application is 212 MB, so it’s all a bit mysterious.

The downloaded executable is a WinZip self-extractor. If you’re a CAD Manager, there’s no point in having the unzip happen 100 times for 100 users when it could happen just once, so you’ll want to grab the extracted files and install from those. This installer makes that difficult, but not impossible. If you want to do that, read on. If you’re just installing it once, skip the next two paragraphs.

Running SetupDesignReview.exe (note the lack of version information), the extraction started but I couldn’t find out where it was extracting to. I eventually found it in the folder %Temp%\XXX.tmp, where XXX is a random name, e.g. _AID0D9. This folder gets automatically erased on completion or cancel, so what you need to do is run SetupDesignReview.exe once, wait for the unzipping to finish but don’t go ahead with the install, copy the %Temp%\XXX.tmp folder elsewhere, then cancel the initial installation. You can then run as many installations as you like using the extracted files.

It would be useful to have these things documented. The Installation Help, System Requirements and Readme links in the installer all rather unhelpfully point to a generic Knowledge Network search.

The install proper will uninstall Design Review 2013 without asking, which is antisocial. For example, if you wanted to keep using HP Instant Printing (not supported in the new release), this installation would mess you up. In my case it also threw up an error during that uninstall, although it still seemed to go through with it.

Note there’s no sign of a release number. The only versioning I can find is in Help > About, with a build version of 14.0.0.177. When you run it, you’ll notice that it hasn’t had the UI of Doom treatment, so it looks like a cut-down AutoCAD from a few releases ago. Not a bad thing.

How about the product itself? Seems to work OK. If you go to open something, it will show you DWG files as well as DWF(x) files. What happens if you try to open a DWG file? This.

Everybody familiar with versioning knows you never put “the latest version” on anything because it’s meaningless. I was once told about a Head Drafter in the early CAD days who had special stamps made up to stamp paper plots with THIS IS THE LATEST VERSION OF THIS DRAWING. The above message is about that smart.

What happens when you pick the Learn More button? Nothing. So I learned nothing.

Anything else? Well, on my system, it takes about twice as long to start up this simple DWF viewer than it does to start up a full-blown CAD application. Want to take a guess at which application I mean?

Can’t complain too much. This product is free, Autodesk is still providing it and still making efforts to keep it up to date. Props for that much, at least.

Bloatware – a tale of two CAD applications

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You may have seen me mention in passing that AutoCAD is bloatware. That’s not just the general grumpy-old-user moan you see from long-term users like me, who can remember when AutoCAD used to fit on one floppy disk.

Yes, programs get bigger over time as new functionality is added and old functionality needs to be retained. Hardware gets bigger, better, faster over time to compensate for that. I get that. Understood.

The AutoCAD bloatware problem is much more than that. AutoCAD is literally ten times the size it needs to be, to provide the functionality it does.

How do I know? BricsCAD proves it. Here’s what I mean.

BricsCAD V17.2 64-bit Windows Download
Downloaded File Size (KB)
BricsCAD-V17.2.03-1-en_US(x64).msi 248,812
Total (1 file) 248,812 (100%)
Equivalent AutoCAD 2018 Downloads
Downloaded File Size (KB)
AutoCAD_2018_English_Win_64bit_dlm_001_002.sfx.exe 2,065,829
AutoCAD_2018_English_Win_64bit_dlm_002_002.sfx.exe 328,277
AutoCAD_2018.0.1_64bit_r2.exe 120,663
AutoCAD_2018_Product_Help_English_Win_32_64bit_dlm.sfx.exe 180,013
Total (4 files) 2,694,782 (1083%)

Which dog is which? They’re both cute, but which would you put your money on in a race?

(Original image: Przykuta)

(Original image: Lisa Cyr)

I’m actually being very generous to Autodesk in this comparison. The two primary AutoCAD download executables alone expand from 2.4 GB to 5.2 GB before install, requiring a total at least 7.6 GB of disk space before we even get to the same ready-to-install point as BricsCAD’s 0.24 GB MSI file.

No, it’s not because BricsCAD is a cut-down application compared with AutoCAD. The opposite is true. Overall, BricsCAD is significantly more feature-rich than AutoCAD. It near-exactly duplicates over 95% of AutoCAD’s functionality and then adds a big slab of its own on top of that. Some of it is in paid-for optional extras, but the code that provides that functionality is still included in the same small download.

This issue isn’t unique to AutoCAD. Super-morbid obesity seems to be standard among Autodesk products. The AutoCAD-based verticals that add a comparable level of functionality to that the BricsCAD download includes are much bigger again!

Anybody care to explain what’s going on here?