Assembly Slow Down Causes

[Recon1775]

Would anyone have insight into the workings of an NX assembly in regards to what may slow down the model response in regards to interacting with the model (rotation, zooming, etc.)
I have a very large 10,000+ part assembly where I only load certain sections of the model depending on where I'm working in the model. If I load models closer to the top of the assembly tree things are fine in regards to model interaction, but when I load a single part much lower in the assembly tree, which means the assemblies along the line will come into play, though without loading anything else in those assemblies into memory the model comes to a crawl especially in selection and zooming.

It doesn't seem to be model specific it just happens when I have a large assembly and load items at deeper levels in the model. The problem is I would expect that loading single items shouldn't slow the model down but when the items are deeper in the assembly tree something else must come into play within the assembly navigator when loading 1 or 2 items that are at deeper levels into the assembly tree. Does anyone have any insight into what NX is loading even if I only choose 1 item at the deeper levels of the assembly tree? There's seems to be a much longer lag time when trying to rotate or zoom the model after any of those deeper leveled items are loaded. When checking the ram pull only 1 GB is used for the model on a 32 GB machine, but the model is still slow to respond.

Using NX 9.

Thanks!

 

[JohnRBaker]

First off, are your Components being displayed using Lightweight Representations (set in Load Options)? How are you loading only some of the Components? Are you simply opening the overall Assembly with NO Components loaded and then manually, using the Assembly Navigator, opening only the Components of interest? Can you provide at least an image showing what one of these "lower" level components look like and it's best if this image was captured while you were working in the context of the overall Assembly?

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Digital Factory
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[Recon1775]

Yes on all that. I'm opening the assembly with No components loaded (Structure only), Lightweight is on. I then dig down into the assembly and locate the particular items I want to load and only load those items (right click and open assembly or component). Though when I do select those lower items the assemblies above that contain that item also appear to load but no other components within those assemblies load. Also I want to note after the model has zoomed once zooming is then smooth again. But if I rotate the model it lags and then again lags on the first zoom action. After that zoom goes smooth again. This situation only happens when I have this large assembly structure loaded model.

Here's my load options settings:

Here's an image of the parts loaded in the assembly context. The parts shown are 4 levels down from the top assembly.

Thanks!

 

[JohnRBaker]

You say that you're running NX 9.0 and I assume that your overall Assembly has been saved as an NX 9.0 part file, but what about those lower level Components? Are they all NX 9.0 versions or are they older, perhaps pre-NX 7.5, part files?

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Digital Factory
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[Recon1775]

The upper assemblies are all NX 9 but yes the lower parts and lower assemblies go back as far as NX 2 and 3. :-(

 

[looslib]

The part schema updates automatically to the current version when you load a part into memory. Loading a bunch of NX2/3 parts will take a little longer than opening those same parts resaved in the latest version of NX. Once loaded, I would think it doesn't make a difference on rotating or zooming. I am guessing by John's question that it does.


"Wildfires are dangerous, hard to control, and economically catastrophic."

Ben Loosli

 

[JohnRBaker]

I would recommend that you immediately run the 'refile' utility to bring these older parts up to date, and when you do, make sure that set the options to make sure that fully compatible lightweight representations are being created.

What I suspect is happening is that even though you've opened the Assembly with the Lightweight option toggled ON, those older parts do NOT have any Lightweight data so it's having to create those representations on-the-fly and since they are never being saved in NX 9.0 format, they have to repeat this process every time these older files are opened.

Anyway, this 'refile' really needs to be done before you go any further in terms of looking for some help with this performance issue.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Digital Factory
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[Recon1775]

That's a good piece of info. If the items I load by selection are more current NX 9 models would the older files still cause a possible issue. I know it might be very hard to say.
For the refile utility can this be done on a server side with all the files stored in Teamcenter?
I've been asking IT to also maybe run Part Cleanup on all the file associated with this program to reduce some issues we have with the older files, but I don't know if they can do that from the server side either.

Thanks!

 

[JohnRBaker]

Yes, you can, but you might need the help of someone more familiar, than myself, with Teamcenter for that one.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Digital Factory
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[Recon1775]

Ok thank you. I'll contact my IT teamcenter folks and see what they can do for us. Thank for the suggestions.
If I can get them to do the refile and/or part cleanup I'll post an update for a complete story on the post.

Thanks again!