Drawing and large assy performance Vs Computer processor. 1

[tap90291]

We are doing some assemblies and drawings (in this case 2338 total components,2109 parts, 473 unique parts,1780 resolved components, 42 upper level mates) drawings are taking 20-30 minutes to load in high quality. The machines are dual xeon 2.4 ghz processors, 2 gigs ram (533 mhz fsb), nvidia fx3000 video cards, and scsi 10k hard drives, we have a dedicated pdmworks server, while the drawings are loading one processor is maxed out. Can we expect to see a real world reduction in load times if we replaced the machines with say 3.4 ghz processors, what about buss speed, and level 2cache 512 now, 1mb has come way down in price.
Performance here is poor, we think we could really help ourselve with better equipment.

Thanks in advance.

TAP

 

[ctopher]

check out tha FAQ for system reqmt's.The faster the processor and better quality hardware will always give you better performance. Also, the way models/dwgs are created can make a difference.

Chris
Sr. Mechanical Designer, CAD
SolidWorks 05 SP2.0 / PDMWorks 05
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[CorBlimeyLimey]

Do you have one drawing with 100s or 1000s of sheets?
How many Megs (or Gigs) are the files you are trying to open?
Have you activated the /3GB switch?
What is you VM set at?


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[meintsi]

Dual processors do nothing for SolidWorks. But it will allow you to work on a word doc or something else while SW is busy.

Last October, when we upgraded our hardware here, we ran some tests. The pump assembly we tested with has roughly 150 unique parts & 8 castings with complex geometry from which the machined part has been modeled.

We took one of the more demanding drawings for this assembly (multiple sections, broken sections, several detail circles, etc..) and timed the opening of the drawing with the entire assembly fully resolved. It took ~34 min. to complete. SW2001+ on a P4 500Mhz 784M RAM machine.

The same draing and software on a 3.4Ghz Xeon 1G RAM opened in about 4 min. The opening time ratio was very close to the ratio of the processor specs.

One last note, opening the same drawing in 2005 takes longer than 2001+, not a lot, but definitly longer.

Remember...
[navy]"If you don't use your head,[/navy]
[navy]your going to have to use your feet."[/navy]

 

[SolidsMaster]

is 20-30 minutes the time from opening directly from PDM works? If so, two things. 1. if you have MS Server 2003 there is a performance hotfix out that needs to be applied, and may need to be re-applied after the latest server update (check SW website Tech. Bulletins). 2. would be, network performance...make sure and routers you may be running thru match you networks top speed, most companies have either a 100base or if you're lucky a Gigabit network. If you have the file saved out of PDM works to a network folder, instead of locally you will also have time lags. Hope that helps some.

John

 

[vikdayal]

I am not too sure if this will help, but how you model and especially if you let some errors, even mate errors exist in you rfiles, it makes the loading time a lot longer than when there are no errors. Also you could try using simplified configs.

If you have hyperthreading activated, it has been known to slow down SolidWorks for some reason, we tested it for one of the lcients and we found it to be true. Hyperthreading does slow down the software.

Besides that yeah - check if you have activated the 3GB switch. Also I was looking into a 64Bit Hardware and OS. It doesnt directly affect the performance of the software, but indirectly it does make SolidWorks much faster, because it allows more than just 2GB RAM and so on ! So that is something you might wanna look into.

Hope this helps
regards

vik

 

[kellnerp]

Check out the performance area of the SW Discussion forum. I have posted a benchmark there called STAR 2.1. Run it on you system and see what you get. A fast system should be getting 40 seconds or faster on a level 5 run. My guess is that your Xeons will clock in at around 70-80 seconds.

 

[tap90291]

I ran the bench mark and found my level 5 time to be 114.45 seconds. I posted those results in the SW performance forum as well. Know I know for sure I have a system that is slow as molassas on a cold day. At least I have found a way to document it.
TAP

 

[kellnerp]

My AMD64 FX53 system does level 5 in about 37 seconds on SW2005 and 34 seconds on SW2004. I have yet to see an Intel system even approach this.

This benchmark may not reflect assembly performance in lightweight mode because it primarily checks the time to create a sketch, extrude the sketch and intersect the sketch with other solids. Then it checks rebuild time. It is pretty much independent of graphics performance. On the other hand, these operations are so basic to what SW does that it certainly has value when rebuilding a resolved assembly or drawing.

 

[Standing]

kellnerp,
Why do you think your AMD64 FX53 system runs faster than mine?

My time:
Time = 44.62 s
Levels = 5

Computer Specs:
AMD Athlon(tm) 64 FX-53
Processor 2.52 GHz,
2.00 GB of RAM

Manufacturer: NVIDIA Corporation
Card: Quadro FX 1100/AGP/SSE2/3DNOW!
Driver: 6.14.10.6722


Bradley

 

[SBaugh]

kellnerp,

What are your other system specs (RAM, Video card)... They should help play a role in your test, would they not?

Regards,

Scott Baugh, CSWP
3DVision Technologies

http://www.3dvisiontech.com

http://www.scottjbaugh.com

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