Files Open Slow (yet again)

You must have a very fast server and network.

versions of SW would open

No sh*t!

Look at the file sizes before and after conversion. The SW04 files are much bigger. The explanation I got (on this newsgroup, naturally, probably from Mr. Eaton) was that SW04 stores additional Parasolid information every few features in your tree. The idea is to make it faster when you roll back in the tree. It only has to rebuild from the last saved Parasolid data. The down side is that every time you save or load a file it has to save all of this extra data, slowing down the process. My colleagues and I find this to be a really bad trade-off, but other people don't seem to mind so much.

Good deduction, but there is nothing flawed in the data. The flaw is in the idea of storing all of that data in the first place.

I'm not a network guru either, but our system administrator told me that it means you are getting 2-5% of your networks capacity. If you have a 100 Mbps network, you are getting 2-5 Mbps transfers. With the SW03 files you were getting 15-30 Mbps transfers.

a very significant

Seems like it to me. My first thought was that your server was spending the time saving the files to its disk, but the disk transfer rate should be orders of magnitude faster than the network rate, so that doesn't seem like a good answer. (Although my disk light stays lit for a long time when I am saving bloated SW04 files locally.)

Yes, we would both love to know!

Jerry Steiger Tripod Data Systems "take the garbage out, dear"

I know AntiVirus can make a huge impact. Where I worked, we had Norton installed on the server and local computers. The effect was the files were getting scanned twice on each access.

We added SWX files to the list of 'safe' files and speed was increased dramatically.

Thanks for posting this! I have asked our system administrator if we can get SW files put on the safe list. Here's hoping that he agrees and we can also see a dramatic speed increase.

Jerry Steiger Tripod Data Systems "take the garbage out, dear"

regarding files access and scanners, I've got sldprt, sldasm files in my exclude list, are there others?( temp files etc) Any other speed ups?

RAD

It is just a 100 Mbps network I think. It helps that there are only 6 workstations on the entire network and not that many of them even use bandwidth of any significance (except for me of course). The server sits about 15 feet away from me which is also a bonus.

I just did another surprising test. If I open a previously "unfrag'ed" SW2003 file, save it in SW2004 format, then unfrag it again after converting, the file size changes very little. In fact, on some of my tests the file size actually got smaller. I basically only open unfrag'ed files. I unfrag many times a day. Generally after I close files in SW, I will unfrag the folder that I am working from. So file size can not be the culprit here.

My point to my test results that I posted was that SW2003 format files seem to transfer across the network at a faster rate of speed than files in SW2004 format. This is what appears to be happening anyway even though I am using SW2004 to open both formats. That is what is blowing my mind. My guess is (being kind-of dumb in this area), there is something about the converted data that causes it for some reason to transfer slower through the data path. Course, I could be way off base here ya know. Just seems strange.

I did a test on this theory and there was atleast a 30% time savings with SW files not being checked. You may not have seen a significant savings if your server is checking outgoing files. You may want to talk to your IT about it.

Corey

I am my own IT (unless it is really deep) and I am very limited on knowledge. Our server is what I believe is called a Samba server. It is basically just a storage facility. Only the internal server software runs on the server box itself and it has no AV. Therefore there is no way that the server is scanning outgoing files. This is controlled on the individual workstations AV. I set mine to skip SW files a while back but did not see a reduction in load times.

To name a few:

.sldprt .sldasm .slddrw .swj .prtdot .asmdot .drwdot .sldbomtbt .sldwldtbt .sldholtbt .sldlfp .slddrt .sldrevtbt .sldmat

You could also do .swp files, but they are probably best scanned. In addition SW loads dlls from the install directory quite frequently.

Our system administrator just removed the SW .dll files from the list of files checked. I haven't noticed any big difference yet, but I haven't been working much in SW lately.

Jerry Steiger Tripod Data Systems "take the garbage out, dear"

This is very peculiar. I did some tests when we first noticed how slow SW files were to load and save and found that the file size increased very significantly. I'm pretty sure that I ran EcoSqueeze on the old and new files before comparing the size. The one thing I did see was that there was a large variation in the increase in size. Usually large files got much bigger and small files got only slightly bigger. Unfortunately, I can't locate my notes and I don't think I have the old files to play with any more.

Jerry Steiger Tripod Data Systems "take the garbage out, dear"

It turns out that SW files were not being checked anyway, so the AV software is probably not to blame for our slow file load and save times.

Jerry Steiger Tripod Data Systems "take the garbage out, dear"