Performance Enhancements

Frozen Content

Altium Vault 2.5 delivers a number of performance-related enhancements, including:

  • When adding model links to a Component Library document through the Choose Models dialog, the dialog's aspect views have been enabled for use. The Preview aspect view is of particular use, allowing you to graphically browse each model, aiding you in selecting the right model to be used.

The aspect view region of the Choose Models dialog is now available, when adding model lnks from a CmpLib.

  • General enhancements to the display of pages in the vault's browser-based interface.
  • Deletion of SVN repositories through the VCS page of the vault's browser-based interface has been enhanced, and made safer. If the repository has one or more projects added to it, you are alerted to this fact, and the repository can not be deleted. The project(s) would have to be removed first. If the repository has no projects, it will not be deleted, but rather moved to an archive directory (\ProgramData\Altium\VaultServerData\RepositoryDumps, for a default vault installation). The repository will be contained within a Dump file, with a Unique ID prefix (e.g. 775f6c22-b9a1-468c-9f1f-4f217bb3be6b_central design repository.dump).
  • When a new user for the Altium Vault is created, the defined Password for that user is stored in both the Vault and the SVN service, since the latter cannot access the password from the former directly. However, the password is stored with the SVN service in plain text format (in the \VaultServerData\Repository\passwd file), which has caused concern over security. Altium Vault 2.5 brings support to disable this synchronization, through use of a new option in the LocalVault.ini file - VcsSyncUserPasswords. By default, this option is enabled (set to '1'), which means password synchronization is enabled. By setting this option to '0', password synchronization is disabled. The result of disabling the option is that when a new user is added to the vault, the passwd file will be updated to add that new user to the list, but the password will not be presented.
For a default installation of the Altium Vault, the LocalVault.ini file can be found in the \Program Files (x86)\Altium\Altium Vault folder of the installation.
The option allows synchronization to be stopped. It does not clear the password entries for synchronized users created previously. You can, however, simply remove these password entries manually.

With password synchronization disabled (VcsSyncUserPasswords=0), a newly added user to the vault (in this case with username test)
will be listed in the local SVN service's passwd file, but the associated password will not.

  • When defining a vault folder, maximum limits are now in place for the Folder Name (160 characters) and Description (255 characters).
  • In the browser-based interface for the Network Installation Service (NIS) - on the Installations page - the operations log (providing indication of running tasks) has been moved to its own dedicated page; Tasks.
  • A new system user (System System) has been created and added to the vault. This user is used for all background tasks (including LDAP Sync, and Notifications). This user cannot be edited or deleted and is permanently online.
The System user does not use a license for the vault.

The ever-present System user - used purely for background tasks.

  • If you are connected to your Altium Vault through Altium Designer, and the session is timed out (for example the session is killed by an Administrator through the vault's browser-based interface), access will automatically be restored on performing any action involving the vault (such as creating a new Item through the Vaults panel).
  • When synchronizing a design that uses vault components, or updating revisions of Component Items through use of the Item Manager, optimizations have been made to speed execution of the subsequent Engineering Change Orders (ECOs). This is achieved through the use of component caching, and the concept of batch cache 'warming', both before, and during, ECO execution.
  • When upgrading to a later version of the Altium Vault, and to prevent potential data loss, a backup of the current vault data is made prior to uninstalling the current vault, using the Backup & Restore tool. The default backup folder is \ProgramData\Altium\VaultServerData, but can be changed as required. The backup data is stored in a file with the format AltiumVault<Version>_backup.zip (for example: AltiumVault2.1.0.37535_backup.zip).

 

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