Save time 2

[ckatz]

I am working with an assembly of 800+ parts, plus I use the family of assembly tool, this is for our drawing production. While the file takes about 6-8 minutes to open it takes nearly an hour to save. Does anyone have any tips for making the save time quicker?

 

[swertel]

Without information about your system, this is hard to tell.

Please inform us of your workstation specs as well as network information.

 

[ckatz]

I have a pentium 4 processor. I also have only 512 mb ram, which I've been recently told is probably my main problem. I'm doubling that. Does anyone know other ways to make saving faster?

 

[Cichlid]

If you upgraded your memory it would definately help speed up your save time! If you find that doubling your memory doesn't help enough you may want to look at upgrading your hard drive to a good SCSI drive. The SCSI drive will speed up your virtual memory and swap file if you exceed your physical memory (this really helps).

We regularly work with assemblies with over 10,000 parts and we rarely have files that take an hour to save, and our models are very detailed. We have a 100MBs network and our computers are all Dells with Pentium 4 Xeon processors ranging from 1.2GHz to 2.0GHz with 1.5GB of fast memory. All of our computers also have fast SCSI hard drives. Our computers are by no means state of the art, but they get the job done very well with large assemblies. Hope this helps.

 

[BBJT]

If you are pulling the files from the network the 100Mbps is very important. We went from 10Mbps to 100Mbps and our speed went from opening 3000 component assembly in 15 mins to 1 Min on SolidWorks.

Also, like Cichild mentioned, more memory will help. If you are swapping to your hard drive because you ran out of memory you might as well go to lunch.

FYI - You may already know this but I thought I would throw it out there for anybody that might not.........

I think Mbps stands for mega bytes per second. To find out what speed your network lines are at you can go under Start, Control Panel, Network Settings, and Local Network and it should show you the speed.

AS far as memory, right-click on your task bar in windows and select Task Manager and click on the Performance tab. You should be able to tell if you are swapping from there. Do not always believe the Available number that it shows. Look at the MEM Usage and if that number is higher than the amount of memory that you have on the computer than you are swapping. Also if your hard drive is doing allot of chattering this is a good sing that you are swapping. BBJT CSWP

 

[DNA]

From my experience there are three things that we did to make our assemblies open and saves faster:

1) Make sure that all parts are properly constrained and all links are correct. The newer versions of SE helps elimnate the need, but every little bit of speed helps.

2) Check your settings on your anti-virus software. If it is set to scan all files, it will have to scan each of the 800+ parts in the assembly when you save it.

3) Network speed and the network card settings. Even though we went to a 100 base T network, our card were set to auto detect. This caused an issue with speed. We manually set the card to 100 base T and the results were phenominal.

By the way, we are running dual 400MHZ machines with 1.5 GB of ram and we do not encounter those types of hour long save times (>1000 part assemblies)

 

[BBJT]

DNA,
Great point about the network card setting. We also ran into that same issue with some of our users also. BBJT CSWP