Rebuilding features slowing assembly rebuild

[toycept]

The assembly I'm working on has only five parts. Every time I make a slight change or edit a part, the file goes through the paces of rebuilding every feature in every part before I can start working on the assembly again. It is really slowing down the process. This seems to be something new as I don't remember things moving this slowly. Is there a preference I might have changed that is affecting the performance of the assembly mode? Or can someone suggest what I might look for to move things along a little faster.

Thanks.

John

 

[Theophilus]

What's your machine running? Version of SW? All hardware you're using? Has this happened ever since you've used this machine?


Jeff Mowry

http://www.industrialdesignhaus.com

Reality is no respecter of good intentions.

 

[toycept]

Jeff...I'm running 2005 sp0.1.... the machine is 1.8, P4 1 gig ram. I don't remember the system taking this long to rebuild every time I make a change to an assembly part.

One thing I did was dump the temp files and also the temp files in the SW back up folder. That actually helped a bit.

I'm not real clear about working in lightweight parts and what that's all about. Maybe that plays a role in the way parts are rebuilding.

Thanks for any suggestions you may have.

John

 

[MElam]

Go to Tools, Options, System options, Performance and see if there is a checkmark by "Verification on rebuild".

If there is, turn that OFF

That setting will cause every feature to rebuild and should only be turned on for troubleshooting.

Only thing I can think of right off

 

[toycept]

thanks MELam.... in fact the Verification on Rebuild option was checked. I unchecked it and I'll report back if that solves the problem.

thanks very much for you help.

John

 

[jrmartin]

I went through this at my last employer. Upgrading to service pack 4.2 should eliminate the problem.

We actually had a team of SW programmers visit our office because our productivity had dropped to 25% (100+ users). Apparently each part file is being concatenated with a bunch of code which executes every time the part is loaded. With each save it just builds upon this pile of code, it only get worse after each save.

After the service pack is installed, your first load will be slow as before. Save each part and the problem should dissappear.

Good Luck

 

[toycept]

JRmartin,

Thanks for the follow up. I'm assuming you are referring to SP 4.2 for SW 2004. I'm running 2005.

this problem is really a pain. It seems to be confined to this one assembly...as when I opened a different assembly, the "rebuilding features" either happens very quickly or is somehow different so the file rebuilds quicker.

I turned off verifcation on rebuild in the options>system options>perfomance...that did not help resolve the problem. I reset all performance and assembly options to the factory defaults... that didn't help.

If I even just delete something from the assembly the file goes through this cadence of "rebuilding features" and seems like it rebuilds every feature of every compnent in the assembly. I do have parts loaded lightweight.

any help / suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks.
John

 

[Theophilus]

Are you paging RAM to your hard drive? (Long shot.) Sounds like it's really some other problem.


Jeff Mowry

http://www.industrialdesignhaus.com

Reality is no respecter of good intentions.

 

[toycept]

I think I figured out what the problem is..... there are two separate parts in the assembly that make up the housing. They are parts that are linked to external references outside of the assembly. I think everytime I make a change to the assembly, the system is referencing those external parts... and that is what is slowing things down.

 

[DDunnJTC]

You can tell SW not to load the external references. I forgot where. Search help for external references and you should find it.

Do you use a lot of in-context references? I have found that I occasionally create a circular refernces without realizing it, and everything slows to a crawls.

 

[toycept]

with this particular project I had started with a solid housing that I eventually split. For some reason that I can't remember, I trashed one of the housing halves and did a mirror or the remaining half. Then I saved the 2 files in "save as" mode to do some other operations on them. So those two original files have been through the mill.... and the files i'm working on now are probably going back to reference the original files. This (it seems) is what's causing the files to rebuild all the time. Very time consuming.

 

[Theophilus]

I've had that happen before. The best thing to do is to clean up the format of references you've got in your first two files and consider using either parasolid export/imports as "dumb" solids--if you don't need to edit the original parts--or to use the original two parts only in the context of their original assembly.

Another good practice would be to eliminate the external references from the two parts and free up the outstanding associations with all the other files. Those references leave you standing on thin ice. (Ever have a file corruption?)


Jeff Mowry

http://www.industrialdesignhaus.com

Reality is no respecter of good intentions.