Inventor slow in large drawings

[anoc]

We are doing layout from 3 of our machines. These machines has about 200 parts each (100 unique) We have made wax models from those machines( converted to single .ipt and broke the link)
Now the 3D world is fast enough, no slowing or anything, but when making drawing, uhhh!
Making anything with the layout takes at least 2 min or even more. I found out that BACKAHL.exe was taking processor and memory and found out that it was just some precise view generator = vain, so I renamed the exe and inventor became little bit faster, alltough now there is error "file not found" every time opening drawing and error "views aren't precice..." when printing.
NOW the question, how on earth to get this faster???

specs:
cpu amd XP2000+
ram pc266 1GB
video: Elsa synergy III 32Mt

assembly:
5 "wax" models ~7MB each
+couple tiny parts
it takes memory about 600MB and when I seems that windows wants to use HD swap rather than RAM!!!(lots of free ran left, but windows says "swap file too small" when opening huge drawing) I made swap larger, but then windoze used it more and became even more slower (not sure, but I'd remember so)

 

[Courtancer]

We have problems with large drawings too. We often do drawings of assemblies with 1000 to 1200 parts and sometimes it will take a couple of minutes to generate a drawing. I had the "views aren't precice..." problem a while ago, (I think it was back in 5.3 or 6) but Autodesk couldn't help ma and said that it was just a bug.
One of the current problems we're having is that when we do a large drawing, if we close the drawing and then try to open it again, it will get 90% into opening it then crash.

Good luck anyway, sorry I couldn't be much help.

 

[Binary]

Interesting...

ADSK's big push on Rubicon - which is what they originally called Inventor - was how well it would handle large assemblies. Supposedly it was going to redefine how parametric modelers would handle them.

I've not used it for big assy's but am disappointed to hear that they may have failed.

 

[autocol]

BackAHL is the application that performs the precise view generation of inventor drawings. what you may notice when you first place a view on a drawing sheet is that the icon for that view in the browser appears red and "half-cooked"... this means that the view has only been approximated by inventor, and slapped on the sheet so that you can continue with detailing etc... it then opens BackAHL and performs the hidden line calcs etc, which, when finished, make the view "precise" and you'll notice that the icon goes grey (or gray, depending where you live ), and the lines on the view itself go nice and perfect...


you can waste your time if you have inventor automatically making views precise before you are ready, and the solution is to go to the drawing tab of the application options and remove the check for "precise view generation"... then, when you have finished detailing everything and can afford to wait a minute or three for it to do the calc, right click on the view and select "make view precise"...


you'll never get good results printing, without precise views..

HTH.

 

[anoc]

I'm not sure, but even if I disabled the precise view generator from options, backahl opens ans consumes copu-time and memory..

 

[autocol]

you may need to close inventor and restart it to have it take effect... (? - possibly...)

 

[anoc]

As weird it might sound, but I noticed that the pc's PS was making high-tone noise every time cpu was 100% When I changed the Power, loading time reduced from 3:40 (min:sec) to 2:20 or something. Also when I copied the assembly to local HD it reduced the time about 30 sec. Maybe we should buy 100 MB/s NIC's =)

Offtopic:
Does anyone have problem opening the inventor cause of antivirus-program? It took 5 min to open, and when I changed swap file and inventor folder so that they weren't in the real-time scan, inventor opens in 35 sec

 

[autocol]

inventor HATES anti-virus programs, because it opens so many files as once.

i set norton to ignore inventor files...


oh yeah, and you should definitely work on the local machine for performance reasons. look into creating personal workspaces for group projects... works really well.