Sluggish Mating Process ??

Not knowing the specifics of your hardware and such, it's hard to make a call. Sluggist Mate performance usualy happens when you have a lot of in-context features and references. If you can reduce or delte them, you should see an increase in speed.

Also by using sub assemblies (not flexible ones you can eliminate many of the mates that have to be figured out every time you add a mate.

Try this select everything in the tree that you have already fully mated. RMB>Form New Sub-assembly here. Now everything that you aren't working on is in a temporary sub-assembly you can then continue to add mates and when you are done you can disolve the temporary sub-assembly to have everything back on the main level.

Corey

How many top level mates do you have?

Corey,

This is a great idea. I have never thought about using temporary sub-assemblies to "speed-up" mating. Slow mating has always been a pet-peeve of mine in larger assemblies. The more mates you create, the slower it is to create mates. By putting a bunch of your parts (and their mates) into a separate temporary sub-assembly, this should act as though there are much fewer mates in the top level assembly. This should drastically speed mating up.

Definitely one to remember...

On the other hand, one of those things that I can't really put a finger on is that I think I crash more after creating subs like that. Makes me nervous to think about introducing more issues.

Another issue is that when you create a sub like that, and haven't put in all mates with that in mind, some of the stuff goes nuts. Just happened to me the other day - parts flipped over, around, inside out, etc. Also, any patterns get left behind.

However, I definitely see the advantage as you point out.

WT

sluggish mating... improper heating at your pad?

Respect

Here's a possible way to troubleshoot if it acts this sluggish when you do a ctrl Q:

Suppress all the mates and ctrl Q. If it doesn't take too long than it's probably a mate or mates. Next, resolve your mates in small groups and rebuild. If at some point the rebuild time jumps drastically you can then narrow your problem down to that group and probably a single mate within that group. At that point either redefine or replace the offending mate.

I had an assembly that had one mate that would increase the rebuild time ten-fold. It was a distance mate between a face and point. I eventually had to figure out a new way to mate it, for some reason a mate to that point really confused SW.

Just an idea, Joe

You could also analyze your mates with our cadDoc tool

which will display your assembly structure as a graph. Then look for circular mates such as part A mated with B, B mated with C and C mated with A. Such closed kinematic loops are harder to solve than tree structure.