SW Performance

Now at work on drawing 2 1/2 hours. 1:22 CPU time and probably 1:40 waiting.

Are you using simplified configuarations for models and assemblies. This can cut time dramatically.

Going to lunch.

At work on drawing 3 hours. 1:52 CPU time and probably 2:12 waiting time.

I know what you mean. If it weren't for library and customer file compatibility, I would be tempted to load up the last SP of sw2000 and work with that. Lightening fast (probably 8 to 1) compared to now, and in my type of work, very few features I would miss.

Bill

Back from lunch

You might try disabling windows virtual memory and see if that helps ( for the large memory projects ). In my instance the project was using 1.3 Gig of memory. I had 2 installed, so should have been no problem. Looking at task manager revealed that, of that 1.3 gig of useage, windows had decided that it was a good idea to run 400 meg of that in virtual memory. Disabling virtual memory was at least a 70% increase in work throughput for that project and I now run with virtual memory disabled all the time.

Note to Brian. It doesn't look like SW is putting anything on disk although there is a lot of page faulting. The amount of physical memory used is equal to the amount SW and other programs are using. Do you run with the 3Gb switch?

Also total memory usage is down to 580 Mb from 1.3Gb. It may be the effect of closing down and reopening the drawing. I can't stay in this mode because FEA requires all 4Gb sometimes.

P. wrote:

dimensions

"Brian"

Right click MyComputer Click Properties Click the Advanced Tab Click settings for Performance Click the Advanced Tab Click Change Check No Paging File Click Set Click OK, OK, OK, etc. Restart

My thoughts on doing this are that Windows changes the way it handles memory and perhaps reduces the memory available for caching and other things to allow programs to have full access. I noticed more disk thrashing after disabling paging. I suspect that everytime SW has to load a dll it has to now go to disk in order to make sure the loaded software has somewhere to live.

In the long run, I don't know if this is such a good idea unless you have

Jerry Steiger wrote:

Yes and no.

We did find that textures can cause a hit and removed them.

Even working on the assemblies is slow.

Image Quality is set near fast which would give a Ship in the Bottle benchmark of around 20 seconds on this hardware.

LightWeight and Large Assembly mode are enabled except when dimensioning to temporary axes. Only the drawing is kept open to enable lightweight to be constantly on. The views are setup and the drafting is done in draft mode.

Some parts and assemblies reside on the network. However, network traffic is generally a small part of the time hit based on XP's network monitor in task manager.

Very few parts have features which are considered complex, most are prismatic extrusions. There are quite a number of helical sweeps, but they cannot be eliminated since that is our product. One subassembly that causes quite a bit of performance degradation does so with a single part that has about 550 bodies in it. So we hide or suppress that part till the end.

The drawing has one top view, three section views and five detail views spread across three sheets. The drawing is done in shaded mode until the end.

The time it would take to go back through and create simplified c> Are you using simplified configuarations for models and assemblies.

This is exactly why I have totally dropped Solidworks and made the switch to Wildfire! There are a few other engineers that I work with that are going to dump Solidworks as soon as they finish the projects that they are currently doing in SW. Solidworks is great as long as you don't have any large assemblies. (In SW's case, 5 part assemblies are large)

Brooke, what do you think of Wildfire so far? I have had enough of SW for a number of reasons and am looking elsewhere now. thanks neil

Wildfire does have some problems but overall I am very happy with it. I had used Solidworks full time since 1996 up until last year and never thought that I would make the move to Pro/Engineer, but now I wonder why I didn't make the switch sooner. Wildfire and Solidworks are about the same cost, Wildfire is much better at surfacing, will absolutely smoke Solidworks when it comes to large assemblies (especially when creating drawings), will run on multiple platforms (Linux, Unix, SUN, Windows, etc), and all of our larger customers are using either Pro/Engineer or Unigraphics (not a single company using Solidworks). I have also noticed that the pay rate is better for Pro/Engineer. The user interface on Wildfire 2.0 is also pretty nice. It is similiar to Soldworks, but there are some modules where the Pro/E 2001 interface will show it's face, but Wildfire 3 is due out soon and I am sure that the old interface will eventually be completely replaced.

"neil" wrote in message news:etj1e.12979$ snipped-for-privacy@news.xtra.co.nz...

ok so what are the problems? ;o)

What kind of parts are your developing (i.e. 5 part assemblies) that would tax SW to such a degree?

Kman

In my case a single part accounts for a lot of the slow down. It is a SaveAs of an assembly and has about 500 bodies in it. That will slow down SW.

However, to set up the drawing I suppress this part until the views are all setup and I absolutely need it. It is a kludge, but it helps.

Kman wrote:

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Paul,

Talk about a kludge, 500 bodies in a single part ? gimmie a break.

One of our ID guys tried pulling this crap, said it was faster. Yea, and we had to re-do the whole thing. I whacked him real good for that. It's horrible modeling practice. Just because the program will let you do something doesn't mean it's a good idea,,,, Sheese!!!

Regards

Mark