When you choose “File, Open,” you are taking a file from fixed disk and loading it into RAM. RAM, or random access memory, is the much faster temporary storage where files are loaded when we are working on them in SOLIDWORKS.
![reduce autocad file size reduce autocad file size](http://cadsetterout-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/AutoCAD-Drawing-utilities.png)
This fixed disk could be a local drive (stored in your laptop or tower), or the fixed disk could be a network drive. When an assembly is slow to open and save, you are running into an issue with loading a large amount of information from the “fixed disk” into “RAM.” The fixed disk, or hard disk drive, on your computer is where your files are stored when the program SOLIDWORKS is shut down and the computer is turned off. Let’s take a look at each cause of slow performance and examine some common approaches to making assemblies faster. Slow to work with (rotate, zoom in and out, add mates, switch between windows)Īlthough there are some overlapping culprits to slow performance, there are generally different causes for the two different types of slowness, which means that you may need to fix each type of slowness by using a different approach.We generally break up poor performance in a large assembly into two types of slowness: Determining your current system resources. To determine the hardware on your computer, you can right-click on Computer, and choose Properties (see Figure 2).įigure 2. So, for the sake of conformity, for this article, we will consider a “large assembly” to be any assembly that slows down a computer running this hardware.
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Since different computers will have different hardware, what constitutes a “large assembly” on one machine (meaning what causes the computer to slow down when working on this assembly) may work fine on another machine, meaning that on this machine, it is no longer considered a “large assembly.”Īt the time of writing this article ( September 2017), most professional SOLIDWORKS workstations are equipped with a processer running at 3GHz (or faster) and 16GB of RAM (or more). Whenever you open an assembly and begin working, and your computer starts to chug(aka slow down), you are working on a large assembly. What is a “large assembly” in SOLIDWORKS?
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The point of this story is to illustrate that there can be a lot of confusion surrounding the question of what a “large assembly” is. He responded, “It’s about the size of a barn….” I asked him, “Approximately what size is the assembly?” My goal was to determine how large the file size was and/or how many components were in the assembly. I was once working on a SOLIDWORKS Tech Support case and a customer told me that he was working on a large assembly. Is it an assembly with over 500 parts? With over 1,000 parts? With 5,000 parts? Is it an assembly that is 20MB in file size? 100MB in file size? 500MB in file size?
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There is often a lot of confusion regarding what constitutes a large assembly. At the end, I will leave you with a list of my top six tools to get the best possible performance from your large assemblies.
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In this blog, I will break down some of these techniques and some of the terminology of large assembly management. The goal of this blog is to illustrate some of these settings and techniques to help your assemblies perform better and faster. Beyond this, your physical computer hardware and networking setup may play a role in the amount of time it takes to open and save your larger assemblies. SOLIDWORKS has some great settings that can help speed up the use of large assemblies, but there are also some modeling techniques that you can use to significantly reduce the time required to open and work with assemblies.