Solidworks Slowness

[SPerman]

I feel like it is 2019 all over again. I've spent most of the morning watching solidworks do nothing. The only evidence in task manager is that the memory usage is high.

I had to kill SW once already this morning, losing work in the process. Now I fear it is hung again. I've been waiting for this assembly to open for over 10 minutes, and it's still only 1/3 done.

The strange part is that I was in these assemblies yesterday and things seemed to be fine. I've rebooted once today. I'm not sure what else to do.

ETA: 2020 SP5

[Glenn Schroeder]

Hello,

Are you working remotely, and/or over a network? If yes, that can have a dramatic effect on speed. All our files are on a network. While working in the office, it's all hard wired, and I see very little lag. When I was working from home it was much slower.

[Alin]

I feel like it is 2019 all over again. I've spent most of the morning watching solidworks do nothing. The only evidence in task manager is that the memory usage is high.

image.png

I had to kill SW once already this morning, losing work in the process. Now I fear it is hung again. I've been waiting for this assembly to open for over 10 minutes, and it's still only 1/3 done.

The strange part is that I was in these assemblies yesterday and things seemed to be fine. I've rebooted once today. I'm not sure what else to do.

ETA: 2020 SP5

Man... how much I would like to take a look at your assemblies...

[SPerman]

You're missing the point. Yesterday, on the same computer, at the same location, this assembly opened in less than a minute. Today, 10+ minutes.

All files are local to my machine. Nothing obvious is different from yesterday.

After a 2nd reboot, it seems better. We will see if it stays that way.

[Alin]

You're missing the point. Yesterday, on the same computer, at the same location, this assembly opened in less than a minute. Today, 10+ minutes.

All files are local to my machine. Nothing obvious is different from yesterday.

After a 2nd reboot, it seems better. We will see if it stays that way.

That makes me even more curious about what is going on your machine...

[SPerman]

It may have nothing to do with SW. But it definitely reminded my of when I upgraded to 2019 and went from being productive to spending long stretches of time staring at the "Solidworks is busy" prompt.

[Tom G]

I don't think that this is the case for you, because your 2nd reboot made it perform better. It's also not Patch Tuesday which adds background tasks in Windows.

I was going to ask if your assembly file size has ballooned to a larger size, merely an idea. This is usually a gradual creep for me, particularly on a large scope and time-lengthy design project. I typically check for this at the end of revision processes and before further production documents are produced, but sometimes more frequently if load & save times increase notably.

For posterity, I reduce assembly file size while preserving attachments within drawings where it is used by:

Save assembly file as same name in different file location. Compare file size with original, decide to proceed with new or accept its original state.
Close all SWx files. Just to be safe, close SWx too.
In File Explorer, Copy the original file to another new location (in case there's any problems). Do NOT move the original file.
Open SWx.
Open new smaller assembly file created at the 1st step.
Save_As the new smaller file in the original location with original filename. Yes, overwrite the original file with the smaller file.

[m2shell]

Sometimes this happens to me when Windows is doing something tedious like updating the File Search Thingy

[SPerman]

I had an SD plugged in, offloading some photos. Maybe that was somehow related. I would like to know why memory usage is so high, while nothing else appears to be happening on the computer.

[Dwight]

Sometimes this happens to me when Windows is doing something tedious like updating the File Search Thingy

Yes, Windows Explorer often goes ballistic on me and hogs resources. I have to open the task manager and restart Windows Explorer to get my PC back.

Dwight

[zwei]

It may have nothing to do with SW. But it definitely reminded my of when I upgraded to 2019 and went from being productive to spending long stretches of time staring at the "Solidworks is busy" prompt.

We had the same issue for sw2019 where it keep prompt for SW is busy... turning off the auto-save and backup since to help

[ryan-feeley]

Yes, Windows Explorer often goes ballistic on me and hogs resources. I have to open the task manager and restart Windows Explorer to get my PC back.

Dwight

I know this is slightly off topic, but as long as your computer isn't 20 years old, make sure you've activated the windows explorer setting to place each window in a separate process. This checkbox has existed for years, but Microsoft made it the default for fresh installs in the last year or so.

I've had great success with this option reducing File Explorer hangs and other issues. I assume some Explorer content menus aren't coded well enough to handle the "multiple windows single instance" situation. So giving each window its own thread and isolated memory helps a ton.

[mp3-250]

We are testing 2021 before rolling it out to cope with the windows version supported by solidworks and looking at the new funny bugs it could be the last straw before the company will go back to 2D. It is a japanese company so everybody will be happy to work 3 times more than now but at least get their job done...

[zxys001]

I feel like it is 2019 all over again. I've spent most of the morning watching solidworks do nothing. The only evidence in task manager is that the memory usage is high.

image.png

I had to kill SW once already this morning, losing work in the process. Now I fear it is hung again. I've been waiting for this assembly to open for over 10 minutes, and it's still only 1/3 done.

The strange part is that I was in these assemblies yesterday and things seemed to be fine. I've rebooted once today. I'm not sure what else to do.

ETA: 2020 SP5

Curious, when this happens again, open Taskmanager and see if File Explorer is running high? If it is,restart it,.. what happens? Does your ASM load normal now?

[mp3-250]

That makes me even more curious about what is going on your machine...

@Alin I watched your presentations and I am very interested in your assembly optimization series. I noticed that you seem to run solidworks with the OpenGL Print Statistics flag enabled in the registry.
May I ask how to read it correctly. I get the FPS part, but the rest like LOD (level of detail?) is documented somewhere? the values are an accurate evaluation even for 2D drawings? (I am getting less than 10 FPS btw)

[SPerman]

Curious, when this happens again, open Taskmanager and see if File Explorer is running high? If it is,restart it,.. what happens? Does your ASM load normal now?

The only activity on the PC was solidworks using a lot of memory. The highest CPU usage was the Pandora App, and it was tiny.

[Alin]

@Alin I watched your presentations and I am very interested in your assembly optimization series.

Glad you found the presentations interesting. Hopefully we will meet soon in one of the LADW courses - https://www.javelin-tech.com/3d/people/ ... -workshop/. Today I finish delivering one of them.

The next one starts on Tuesday, 19th April, 2022.

I noticed that you seem to run solidworks with the OpenGL Print Statistics flag enabled in the registry.
May I ask how to read it correctly. I get the FPS part, but the rest like LOD (level of detail?) is documented somewhere? the values are an accurate evaluation even for 2D drawings? (I am getting less than 10 FPS btw)

Good question. I will ask around and update this thread.

[Alin]

May I ask how to read it correctly. I get the FPS part, but the rest like LOD (level of detail?) is documented somewhere? the values are an accurate evaluation even for 2D drawings? (I am getting less than 10 FPS btw)
image.png

Thanks for asking, again. I learned something today.

Interesting read: https://courses.cs.duke.edu/spring15/cp ... in/LOD.pdf

In regard to your slow frame rate... do you have the Enhanced Graphics on or off? With the box checked, the FPS jumps to hundreds on a professional video card.

And... if you use SW 2022, your drawings will experience the same high FPS rate.

Update (answers from a more experienced colleague of mine):

• Rebuilds: number of rebuilds

• SPBodies: the number of solid bodies being shown on screen

• SPTime: time it took to rebuild (if you keep rebuilding without changing anything you will see this value approach 0)

• FPS: frames per second

• Frames: How many frames it has had to load. Try spinning your model around and this number will keep going up

• @ X - X : I'm pretty sure this is the size of the frame having to be loaded

• LOD: level of detail

[mp3-250]

Thanks for asking, again. I learned something today.

Interesting read: https://courses.cs.duke.edu/spring15/cp ... in/LOD.pdf

In regard to your slow frame rate... do you have the Enhanced Graphics on or off? With the box checked, the FPS jumps to hundreds on a professional video card.

And... if you use SW 2022, your drawings will experience the same high FPS rate.

Update (answers from a more experienced colleague of mine):

• Rebuilds: number of rebuilds

• SPBodies: the number of solid bodies being shown on screen

• SPTime: time it took to rebuild (if you keep rebuilding without changing anything you will see this value approach 0)

• FPS: frames per second

• Frames: How many frames it has had to load. Try spinning your model around and this number will keep going up

• @ X - X : I'm pretty sure this is the size of the frame having to be loaded

• LOD: level of detail

Thank you @Alin for the precious feedback.

I am actually in the process of quantify the Enhanced graphics before rolling out SW2021 so those informations allow me to show some numbers to my bosses. Unfortunatelly we have lot of slow downs with our machinery design for both 2D and 3D. Lightweight and speedpak is not an option for us and we need to find a way out and lot of bugs in cutlist and pdm are not helping us.

I am working in this company since one year ago with zero formal experience in cad administration as I worked as a mechanical engineer for 20yrs before (UG/NX and ProE since 2003, SW since 2014) and I did mainly 3D design and simulation.

[the_h4mmer]

Thanks for asking, again. I learned something today.

Interesting read: https://courses.cs.duke.edu/spring15/cp ... in/LOD.pdf

In regard to your slow frame rate... do you have the Enhanced Graphics on or off? With the box checked, the FPS jumps to hundreds on a professional video card.

And... if you use SW 2022, your drawings will experience the same high FPS rate.

Update (answers from a more experienced colleague of mine):

• Rebuilds: number of rebuilds

• SPBodies: the number of solid bodies being shown on screen

• SPTime: time it took to rebuild (if you keep rebuilding without changing anything you will see this value approach 0)

• FPS: frames per second

• Frames: How many frames it has had to load. Try spinning your model around and this number will keep going up

• @ X - X : I'm pretty sure this is the size of the frame having to be loaded

• LOD: level of detail

The @ X - X might be max/min or max/avg frame times; ie. how many (ms) it takes for each frame to be rendered, which is also how long each frame is displayed on screen. At 20 fps, your "perfect" frame time should be 50 ms, but if your max frame time is 82 ms, you'd likely see ~12 fps. Frame times is a bit of a more discrete measurement value than FPS and consistent values will mean you'll observe less video studdering or perceived "slowness"

Or it could be like Alin said, and it's the min/max frame size. The higher the number, the more video memory (vRAM) will be needed to render the scene, since the GPU RAM is where the frames are buffered. If we assume the frame size is ~82 kb (kilobyte), for 90 frames the total vRAM needed will be ~7.4 MB (0.007 GB), if instead the frame size is if it's ~82 MB per frame (I doubt this since raw video of 1920 x 1080 @ 8-bit color depth should be 0.002 GB/frame) then it would be 7.38 GB.

That's about the extent of my knowledge, but figured I'd weigh in since there isn't a specific indicator and I couldn't find any documentation (quickly) on what those values meant. I guess if you tried loading multiple models with various colors, you could check if those values increased, if they do, then it's likely frame size, if they do not, I'd guess they'd be frame times.