CAD Forum

Hi,

I'm noticing that activating the Assembly Visualization feature (Evaluate) takes an extremely long time to complete. For a small assembly it is taking approx. 2.5 minutes! I don't remember this feature ever taking so long to run.

After some research I've discovered that if I disconnect from our VPN (and thus PDM) or I de-activate the Solidworks PDM Add-in then run the command it finishes in 1 second or less. This points to the command looking out to PDM for information and it getting a response VERY slowly. Looking at the machine running PDM I can see that during the 2.5 minutes the CPU ramps up to 80 to 85% for that entire time. I'm trying to ascertain if this is an implementation problem with Assembly Visualization or an implementation problem with our PDM (or both).

I am running SW 2024 SP5.0

Does anyone else experience this slow behaviour when running Assembly Visualization and connected to PDM?

I'm gonna guess it has something to do with the 2024 enhancement to Visualization to show PDM information such as state, checked out, etc.

Look on page 4 of: https://files.solidworks.com/Supportfil ... wSWPDM.pdf This is certainly a VAR ticket you need to open.....maybe it can turned be off somewhere. Sounds like it must first be turned on inside PDM administration. Or it could be a bug in that's its querying PDM data regardless if its turned on or not.

Interestingly this is the new feature that I wanted to utilize where you can read/list/export custom PDM variables in Assembly Vis. Initially I was testing with an assembly of under 10 parts on a sandbox test instance of PDM and the delay in the Assembly Vis tool loading was noticeable but not a big deal. It wasn't till I moved to a much larger assembly that the delay became a problem. I thought as you did that the new feature might be causing the delay so I tried the same assembly in our production PDM, that does not have this feature turned on and it still showed the same slow behaviour.

Currently I think as you mentioned that it might be a bug that is querying PDM data regardless of being turned on or not.. I've opened a ticket with our VAR.

It would be nice though if anyone running SW 2023 on PDM or prior could see if they experience any delays on large assemblies when activating the Assembly Visualization tool.

Your help and input is greatly appreciated!

Unfortunately I upgraded from 2023 to 2024 over the holidays. I can confirm that with 2024 and PDM, Assembly Visualization is extremely slow. (So slow that it is essentially unusable.)

hcgord wrote: ↑Thu Jan 09, 2025 2:20 pm It would be nice though if anyone running SW 2023 on PDM or prior could see if they experience any delays on large assemblies when activating the Assembly Visualization tool.

Define "large" assembly?

Visualization opened and rendered the default colors in 4 seconds. This was opened from our PDM vault so everything was loaded from the local cache. Both SolidWorks and PDM 2023 sp5.

Good point, that's very subjective.

I found a sub assembly with a similar number of components to the one you show. It takes SW 2024 SP5.0, 1min 50 seconds to open and render the default colours. Most of the assemblies I'm dealing with are alot larger than this....