Solidworks slows to a crawl with 1000's of holes

[powder99]

I have a drawing with 1000 or so holes and it takes close to 20 minutes to open. I have read previously that solidworks is not good at handling so many holes. Has anyone else experienced such a major slowdown with Solidworks. I have a pentium 4 2.4 Gig machine with 2 gig RAM

 

[Theophilus]

I did an electric razor screen with SW 97+ a long time ago. That was a heavy-duty part. I exported into a different form (parasolid is great), and then used the parasolid with the real SW file hidden in assemblies/drawings. Saves a lot of time. Just make sure you update the parasolid if you edit your SW file.




Jeff Mowry
Industrial Designhaus, LLC

http://www.industrialdesignhaus.com

 

[CorBlimeyLimey]

How are you creating your holes? With many profiles on one huge sketch or with the Hole wizard to make one hole & then pattern or a combination of both or ...? Have you tried the copy Geometry switch when patterning?

Are they complex or simple holes?



CorBlimeyLimey
Barrie, Ontario
faq559-863

 

[powder99]

They are simple holes created by using the extruded cut feature and then linear patterned.

 

[CorBlimeyLimey]

Just tried a simple test with flat rectangular sheet & inserted 5000 holes. My system locked up & crashed after 20+mins & giving Virtual Memory shortage error.

Rebooted, cleaned up the mess, changed VM min & max to 2048 (which supposedly is the maximum recognised by Windows) & tried again. This time it took a couple of mins to create but about 12mins to save. Quit SW after save, rebooted to regain VM, opened test file in about 1.5mins. Changed pattern to include Geometry & rebuilt in about 1 min but still takes about 10 mins to save.

I'm running a P3-700 with 512meg SDRAM, & SW03-SP0. Will try again tonight on a P4-2.4G, 512 DDRAM. I keep getting interupted here at work. Very inconsiderate bosses...they keep expecting me to do stuff for them!!!!!!


CorBlimeyLimey
Barrie, Ontario
faq559-863

 

[powder99]

Thanks for your input. I'm doing a few more test as well and will keep the thread up to date.

 

[powder99]

It seems that the problem is a CPU issue as the task manager indicates that CPU usage is at 100% and the RAM usage tops out at 500meg. The machine I am using has 2gig of RAM.

 

[CorBlimeyLimey]

Tried the same test last night without any problem using SW04-SP1. Took about 30 seconds to load & less than two mins to do a save.

Good luck with your cpu issue. Please post your fix when/if you find one.


CorBlimeyLimey
Barrie, Ontario
faq559-863

 

[powder99]

The machine I am using is a P4 2.4G which should be more than enough processing power. We are running SW03-SP5.1. I tried opening the assembly on a P4 3.2G machine and I experienced the same slow issue - it took 25min to perform the simple task of changing the hole diameter. The test file you used is it possible to send this and I can do a test on my machine and compare to your results last night.

 

[Theophilus]

What operating system are you using, and do you know how much RAM you have allocated to use? Sometimes the setting can be set below the RAM you actually have and cap your potential. Also, Windows 9x has severe limits for RAM--hope you're not using that.

(You can adjust your memory settings through the control panel under the Advanced tab of System--just in case.)




Jeff Mowry
Industrial Designhaus, LLC

http://www.industrialdesignhaus.com

 

[powder99]

I'm using Win XP Pro with 2 gig allocated to use.

 

[Theophilus]

Very bizarre--sounding more like a SW issue now.

The way I made the razor screen (sheet metal part with a large radius, proportionately) was to flatten the bends and pattern the holes. I did this in SW 97+, as I mentioned on an NT workstation with dual P2 300 chips and 512Mb RAM. It took all lunch time to process the bends after patterning the holes, and any edits after that were a bear, hence saving out as a parasolid for work within the assembly.

I would recommend trying the same part you have with a different version of SW, just in case. Perhaps this will reveal whether the problem resides in the part (I've had this happen) or in the SP of SW you're using.




Jeff Mowry
Industrial Designhaus, LLC

http://www.industrialdesignhaus.com

 

[CorBlimeyLimey]

powder99
Sure I can send it, just let me know where to.
All I did though was to create a solid, 15" square x .10" thick, extrude-cut a .10" hole just in from one corner & then "linear arrayed" that hole in a 100 x 50 pattern using .14" pitch.

To confirm my times I just re-opened the test part (12 secs),
Changed square to 30" & rebuilt (2 mins),
Edited pattern spacing to .28" & rebuilt (30 secs),
Resaved (1 min 20 secs).


CorBlimeyLimey, Ontario, Canada
Don't Take It Personal, Have Fun While You Learn
faq559-863

 

[SBaugh]

If you Hyperthreading on your P4 computers, disable it.

Regards,

Scott Baugh, CSWP

http://www.3dvisiontech.com

http://www.scottjbaugh.com

faq731-376

 

[powder99]

How do you disable Hyperthreading?

 

[SBaugh]

At the bios level, after you restart windows.

Regards,

Scott Baugh, CSWP

http://www.3dvisiontech.com

http://www.scottjbaugh.com

faq731-376

 

[powder99]

I dont have the option to disable HT in the Bios - is there an alternative method of disabling?

 

[powder99]

HT is only support in P4 processors with 800Mhz FSB. My processor is only a 2.4G CPU with a 533Mhz FSB so therefore I dont have HT.

 

[CorBlimeyLimey]

Are you running an anti-virus package? If so make sure the auto-protect is switched OFF. This feature really slows things down as each & every file is checked when it is opened (&, I believe, when closed). This is usually unecessary unless you are in a very high risk of exposure to viruses. I just leave my incoming & outgoing emails protected.


CorBlimeyLimey, Barrie, Ontario.
Don't Take It Personal, Have Fun While You Learn
faq559-863

 

[powder99]

I am running NAV corporate and have excluded the network drive I am referencing.