Performance Issue

[bluesman0007]

Running SW2004 Office SP2.01, Pent4 3.00 GHz, 512mb ram, windows XP Pro. I don't do this often but am modeling a herringbone gear 24" dia. with 101 teeth. I'm using a swept cut to profile the teeth and everything goes okay with the first cut, then I circular pattern to get one side and it takes a minute but the teeth appear. Now I mirror those features to get the other side of the gear and I get the dreaded hourglass, then the program not responding. This is being done just for looks as I give the gear data in the drawing. Is there a less intense way of being able to show these gears? I know by saving the gear sans the second or mirrored set of teeth the file is just under 13,000 kb. Any suggestions?

 

[aamoroso]

In the past I have done similar by only modeling a few of the teeth and showing the rest as a sketch. Dont know if that is acceptable for you or not.

 

[SBaugh]

1) Your using a sweep - which is what you need to do to make the gear, but that is a semi-time consuming feature (Depending on complexity) so here is your first slow down

2) Patterning - Patterning will bring SW to it's knees sometimes and with the feature your doing your going to see this.

3) Mirroring - Now your mirroring "X" amount of teeth over to the other side. you might as well keep it all in one feature instead of 2. Because it's probably going to take as much time to pattern all 101 teeth as it would to pattern "X" amount and mirror it. But proper practice would be to just pattern all of them.

4) 512 MB ram - You shouldn't run less than 1 Gig with SW04

5) Just because your Task Manager says Not responding, doesn't mean that SW isn't responding. That is windows way of informing you that SW is busy. If your CPU processes are completely dead or running in the 0% area then SW has locked up (Maybe). But not till then. If your getting a Not responding and your CPU is busy walk away because it's processing your request.

6) Check Tools\Feature Statistics - for the amount of time a feature will take

Try getting or using Geartrax -

http://www.camnetics.com

Regards,

Scott Baugh, CSWP

http://www.3dvisiontech.com

http://www.scottjbaugh.com

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[bluesman0007]

Thanks aamoroso and Scott for the info. Geartrax sounds like it could take care of several problems we run into. I knew I was pushing the 512mb. Scott your number 5 was right on since I did eventually walk away and it completed. Thanks again guys.

 

[Bouke]

I've learned not to look at the cpu-meter at the task-manager but rather at mem-usage. If your mem-usage isn't changing anymore while sw is doing something. It has probably crashed...