Hi Patrick,

Are you using Zemax Files on a cloud drive or shared network drive? If so, moving DATA from the network share to a local drive should help. Note that changing DATA from project preferences does not move any existing files, it recopies the standard files that come with Opticstudio. You would need to move any lens files  custom catalogs, dlls, etc from the old location manually.

https://my.zemax.com/en-US/Knowledge-Base/kb-article/?ka=KA-01532

Best,

Ali

Hi Ali,

Thanks for the reply.  I'm not using any cloud drives.  I have all my DATA files on a local drive except for macros which points to a shared network drive.  The only 'time' issue is saving a .ZMX lens file to a shared network drive via VPN.  Saving it to a shared network drive via LAN works just fine ... it's fast.  Saving text data (from an analysis window) to a shared network drive via VPN is also fast.  It's just the .ZMX files that save very slow ... ~3 minutes for a 20 surface, 3 configurations system..

Thanks.

Patrick.

BTW, the file I mentioned is on the order of 40KB in size but the Zemax sample Cooke triplet (7.5KB) also takes about 3 minutes to save.

Hello! 

This is unusal since the shared drive otherwise doesn't give you any problems. If your data files are already on your local drive, why are you also saving lenses to a network drive? is it to share them? Maybe as a workaround you can save the lens files locally then copy the ZMX to the shared drive after instead. 

Yes, it's to share them among the 3 computers I'm using.  Yes, that's a viable work around but is unmanageable when using 3 computers to run different tasks on the same lens file(s).  Do you have the capability to test this at your facility on a shared drive through a VPN or have you tried and not seeing the same issue?

Thanks.

Patrick.

Ok, thanks for that. I tried a basic test saving over our VPN and it did take like 15 seconds to savthe basc lens.zmx e to our shared drive. Im going to do some tests with various versions and see if i can identify if this became an issue recently or what. Hopefully it's something we can fix in Opticstudio rather than a weird Windows issue we cannot fix.

As this may require a bug report or giving you further help, i'm going to open a support case for you and stop replying in this thread. I'll send any updates via email 

Best regards,

Don D  

Just a thought, but how big are the ZDA files associated with the ZMX? They can be easily 10x or more the zmx size.

Don, I sent in a help request on the same day I started this thread but haven't heard anything.

Mark, for your Cooke triplet sample file it's about 170KB.

Thanks.

Pat.

I experience the same problem as Patrick, slow acces over a VPN network. Takes ages to save the zemax files (although they are modest in size (100 to 400k). If zemax is operated on the local network, same files are saved in a blink.

Is there already a sollution for?

regards,

Arnoud

Arnoud, outside this forum I had an email conversation with Zemax support and they have the same issue and were going to look into it but I've haven't heard back.

Patrick.