Toolbox is SLOWWWWWW

[mikestl]

I am a new Solidworks user going on almost a year. We have been building an assembly which now has a couple thousand parts and almost 2000 fasteners (nuts/bolts/washers). We are at the point now where it takes 9-10 minutes to open our main assembly. That's understandable and bearable. The main problem is when I try adding toolbox fasteners. It takes over 4 minutes to get the first bolt located and over 6 minutes to get 3 total bolts placed. I've timed it on our original PC's (which were new last year) and newER PC's which we are testing out to see if we got any performance increase, which we didn't.

I looked through old posts regarding Toolbox slowness but couldn't find anything less than a few years old. We are using SW 2012.

I'm trying to find out what the bottleneck is. Is it the Toolbox? A simple setting in Toolbox? Is there a setting to check for which would help?
Does anyone think we'd have much better performance if we changed everything to individual fastener files with configurations? Would this task be a nightmare now that we are this far into the project?

Computer specs
Six Core XEON E5-1650, 3.2GHz, 12M, Turbo+, Dell Precision T3600
16GB RAM
Quadro 2000 vidoe card

Thanks,
Mike

 

[GRF]

Is your toolbox located on a network location so it is shared? The only time I have had speed issues with the tool box was when it was located on a network drive. But then again, most of my assemblies are in the 15-20 part rang.

 

[Updraft]

Mike,

A few tips will help a lot.
1. Use subassemblies. Use them a lot. Subassemblies can be located with only a very few mates and all the parts within them are hence located. SolidWorks has less computing to do to resolve all the mates because there are fewer of them.
2. Use patterns and use them a lot. Label them so you know what the pattern belongs to or what it does.
3. Use folders to groups parts and subassemblies. You can suppress/unsupress these folders with a single click.
4. Mate the parts together without fasteners, then add the fasteners. This way the parts are not dependent on the fasteners to keep them together and when the fasteners are suppressed the parts will still be in their proper relationships.
5. Use configurations to simplify your life. In this case of you could have one configuration with all the burden of all the parts, subs, and mates fully resolved for when you must have that, and another configuration with all the fasteners (in their folders and labeled patterns) suppressed. This config will be much faster and less cluttered.

- - -Updraft

 

[mikestl]

GRF - Toolbox has been on my PC directly, a slow network drive, and another PC on the homegroup. None had any difference in performance.

Updraft
I think I am following items 1-3 to the best our design allows. I will review my model regarding item 4. I know of a couple places I can fix this. Item 5 is interesting. I am not a wiz yet with configurations but tell me if these steps are correct to do what you suggest

1. Activate Fastener suppressed configuration
2. Add fasteners
3. Suppress Fasteners
4. Activiate Fastener UN-suppressed configuratin.
5. Unsuppress Fasteners.

Is that correct?

Your other suggestion to avoid configurations to add a few fastener folders sounds good too. I might try that. I'm beginning to see the downside to this one though. In order to suppress sub-assembly fasteners, you would need to go through all your sub-assemblies, find their fastener folders and suppress/unsuppress. Sounds like a pain. Now I see the advantage of the 2 configuratonis in the main assembly.

Thanks!

 

[ctopher]

I always make my fasteners lightweight, it seems to help.

Chris
SolidWorks 11
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