Text Pattern Feature Performance is Terrible

[sirmick]

I am experiencing terrible perfoprmance with the text pattern feature. I have approximately 15 characters that are being extruded and my machine proceeds to use all of the physical and virtual memory available and Solidworks will not respond.

The creation of the feature was not a problem. The problem occurs whenever the model needs to be rebuilt. The system specs are Win2000, SW 2003, 512MB ram, and Nvidia Quadro Pro 2 Video Card. This video card is a "green" one according to the SW website.

 

[APPENG]

Sirmick

you have just about the same setup as me, and I have very good performance on my machine. One thing you left out is what processor you are using, ans also what service pack you are running of solidworks. One thing to note that text is inherantly a "hog" but it usually not that bad

there are some system tweaks that you can make to windows that can increase perfomance. but many factors can contribute to a poor performing system.

Lets take a look at your system and find out how much free space you have on your hard drive.

How fragmented is the drive

How much memory do you have devoted to the paging file? (typically you want about 4x the amount of physical ram...ie a 512 Mb system would run 1500 to 2000Mb of paging file size. Also make sure the max and min values are the same)

do you have "verification on rebuild" turned on under tools/options/performance? If so turn it off!!!

what is the image quality set to in the document properties?

I sometimes have to perform operations that require an extensive rebuild time, such as patterns or text, and what i do in these cases where it hold me up while making changes is to suppress them until I am ready to detail the part or send it out, at which time i unsuppress the "heavy" features...

let me know what you find out about your system.

Regards,
Jon
jgbena@yahoo.com

 

[APPENG]

Also if you wonder which features are the most expensive to rebuild check out the feature statistics under the tools menu and it will show from most expensive to the least

Regards,
Jon
jgbena@yahoo.com

 

[sirmick]

Thanks for the responses, I haven't had the oppurtunity to see if defragmenting the hard drive helps. I am thinking that increasing the physical ram from 512MB to 1.5GB should do the trick.

The processor is a Pentium 4 1.7GHz.