Doing all things wrong for Solidworks Performance, need advice.

My company has been using Solidworks for about three years and all that
time we have had extremely poor performance/stability from the product
especially with imported geometry. We build automation and assembly
equipment and each machine usually starts around a large piece of
imported geometry. Complexity varries but a good example would be an
automotive seat track assembly complete with springs, motors, all
contoured surfaces, wires, etc.

Our inital hardware deployemnt of (13) P4 2.4GHz, 1GB ram, 3dlabs
wildact II 5000 machines have given good service in our mixed CAD
enviroment of Pro/engineer, autocad, and solidworks. I have started
replacing them with compaq XW4100 and XW4200 with 3dlabs Wildcat VP 880
PRO, Realzim 200, and Nvidia FX3200 cards which have been giving good
performance but having Solidworks stability issues. All patches,
drivers, have been researched and loaded.

To research this I have downloaded the SPEC 2005 benchmark and will be
running this on all solidworks workstations and laptops both with local
files and network files. So far results have been VERY mixed. Gigabit
ethernet helps considerably if the server has enough resources. Which
at this time appears to be our problem, all servers have gigabit
ethernet but the Ultra 160 SCSI cards can't keep up the flow of data.
The server network utilzation is very low 10% or less. We have
PDM/works but have not deployed it becasue of interface, political, and
cost issues (no time for conversion or deployemnt).

Please provide any comments.

Thanks
Anthony J. Kiszka
IT Manager
Orbitform Inc.
1600 Executive Drive
Jackson, MI 49203
517-787-9447 ext 219
517-787-6609 FAX
"World Leaders in forming, fastening and riveting System"

www.orbitform.com

 

Anthony,

Sorry to hear about your problems. Some of what I have is just
opinions, but the opinions are based on seeing a lot of setups in
trouble. I never seem to hear from people if things are going well.

Anyway, here are some observations:

- Imported Geometry. Imported geometry sux, but if you manage it well,
you can minimize the problems. Get good imported data (don't work with
Catia data if you can help it). Make sure the source of the data round
trips the export to make sure it comes back in to the parent system ok.
Learn to use the Import Diagnosis, that can help you out.

- Stability. I've been pounding 14 hour days on my 3 year old laptop
for the past week doing complex surfacing around imported Catia
geometry, and have only crashed once this week. Regardless of what
people want to believe, it is possible to have a relatively stable
installation of SolidWorks. The secret is to know the secret (duh), and
to be careful about how you treat your machine, what you install, set
up, maintenance, etc.

- Wildcat. People seem to like the Wildcat cards, but in my visits,
I've found a majority of Wildcat users have problems they can't account
for. They're expensive cards, but that doesn't always equate to what
you'd think it should. You're better off with the nVidia cards, in my
opinion.

- Spaceballs. Spaceballs are probably the #1 hardware/driver
troublemaker (aside from video cards). If you use a spaceball, make
sure you keep the latest driver and SW add-in. I was in a company ready
to throw PDMWorks out the window because it always locked up their
systems unless you did this really difficult manuver with the mouse and
keyboard when it opened up. The problem was that the spaceball splash
screen conflicted with the PDMW splash screen. A new spaceball driver
saved PDMW from the trash heap.

- 1 Gb RAM. Sounds like a lot, and it used to be. But if you're doing
what sounds to be large assembly design, you might want to plan to use 2
Gb. Watch your Task Manager and see how high the peak memory use goes
in a typical modeling session (especially drawings). If you're paging
to the HDD, you're wasting time. Plus, if your memory usage gets to
about 1.7 Gb, you're gonna crash anyway unless you use the /3Gb switch
(google the group for more info).

- Networks. Networks are notorious sources of error. I recently went
to a company who was having problems that sound like yours (I work as an
independent SW consultant). The time to open this one drawing in
particular was their benchmark of success to determine whether they
should pay my fee or not. We went from over 15 minutes to open the file
to under 1 minute (not using lightweight). True story. A fast network
is better than a slow one, but the main goal is to eliminate the
network, gig or no gig. The way to eliminate working across the network
is to install and use that PDM system that you have already paid for. (I
know a consultant who can get you running, configure and educate you on
PDMWorks in 2 days)

- Modeling. Of course the way you model effects speed. There's a lot
of info posted on this, so I won't go through it again. Google the
group or check out stuff on my website.

- System setup. I'm not an IT guy, I'm a mech eng. When I go into
places with a cocky IT manager, it's hard for me to tell him he could
improve things (especially when it's his anti-virus software which is to
fault). When you install things, ask "do I need this", and then if yes,
"do I need this on THIS computer". I have a consumer-grade multi-media
PC for consumer-grade software, or anything which gets in the way of my
workstation going as fast as it can (iTunes is a great application, but
don't use it on your workstation). I reformat and reinstall the OS
every 6-9 months. Why do you have to do this? Because Microsoft is a
pretty sloppy OS (speaking of "consumer-grade"), and SolidWorks only
runs on Microsoft. Oh, and personally I'm not a big fan of Compaq for
workstations. Dell is a step up, but HP, IBM and Sony are probably more
reliable (especially if you're constrained to big name brands), and my
new favorite is Boxx.

Anyway, some of this is covered by different things on my website. Some
of the information is getting a bit dated, but it's still useful.

http://mysite.verizon.net/mjlombard/
http://www.dezignstuff.com/

The verizon site has most of the useful content.

Best of luck,

Matt

 

Howdy Anthony-

Two questions come to mind initially

1) Do your imported models resolve to solids or are they collections
of surfaces? If you inport, do you also import curves. You may
benefit from having solids (making sure the models you get are water
tight) without the extra wires around them.

2) Are you using large assembly mode and loading lightweight where
possible once you do begin your design process? Can you reduce your
Tool->Options->Doc Properties->Image quality and get a better
performance?

Can you elaborate on your actual issues? This one almost classifies as
a "We are having trouble" but way too general. Are you crashing, slow,
etc?

Just a few ideas on settings - there's a lot more out there if you
search this group for performance.

Later,

SMA

 

I will try to clarify some of the issues we are having and answer
questions.

The primary file server is serving about 100 users (all file serving
needs for the company). (5) 70 gb 15K rpm Ultra 160 drives which
yeilds 273GB of storage which is about 66% full. Dual P3 1GHZ with 1GB
ram and 1gigabit ethernet connection. This file server is due for
repalcement, its hardware is not windows 2003 server compatible so were
are specifying replacements.

All of our newer workstations are HP 4100/4200 P4 3.4 or better 2GB ram
and Nvidia based graphics. These machines are working well. Based on
what I have learned durning the benchmarking I may step up the line to
the 8200 series which used AMD chips. The problems we are having are
on our older machines which I am coming to realize are the problem.
They just are not fast enough and replacment will be necessary. The
battle I will be fighting is I need these machines to get a three-four
year life span, two in engineering, 1-2 in other areas. One thing I
find puzzling is solidworks doesn't seem to use memory like pro/e, I
very rarely see over a gig of ram being used.

As for stability I have always like the 3dlabs/Wildcat lines for their
stability. I purchased a couple of the VP line but they are only
slightly faster then the old wildcat II 5000 we were using, I suspect
this is from the 8x agp alone. Also many of our systems are rock solid
stable. The issues seem to arise when they really have to tax their
machines.

IT/network issues, Antivirus and antispyware systems all have been
programmed to ignore the solidworks program folders and all solidworks
file types, along with autocad, pro/e etc. Running the solidworks
benchmark accross the network on our fastest machine proved a 30%
slowdown in I/O. Now this was using a 100MB ethernet connection, my
testing has shown you can get about 15% of that back by switching to
gigabit ethernet. I will be putting the plans together to add a
gigabit switch to the wiring closet, and a addtional backbone just for
the engineers to use.

Political issues keep us from using PDM/works along with its really
poor interface for checking in and out assemblies and the fact that it
won't handle pro/e and autocad withing the application. As well as the
addtional cost for stand alone seats for the rest of the company to get
access to the vault to lookup drawings. More maintenance revenue for
solidworks, I thought Pro/E was bad!

Actual issues, well. The biggest one is dealing with imported geometry
which casues system slowness. We have no control over it, our
customers barely provide it in a timely fashion and it is what it is.
If we don't like what we get we are told to bad, you have prints model
it yourself. We barely have time to convert the files usually. For
example we recently built a six station rotary table assembly system
which had a large imported customer parts a power window assembly which
were duplicated in the assembly to check rotation clearance. This was
killing the system.

Typically our models due reslove as solids, but not until having to do
some repair. Quite often we do the import into pro/e first becasue it
does a better job putting the parts/assemblies together, then
re-export.
I can set the image quality and the large assembly mode lower to show
less part detail while moving and spinning but that's were my users
revolt. "They want their cirlces to be round and all part shown all
them time" My response from them in I don't have reduced quality in
Pro/e, whay do I have to have it in Solidworks? We also NEVER have
slowdowns in Pro/E like solidworks on the same hardware.

My fear here is that becasue of solidworks design it will drive me to
replace the workstations faster, yearly showing a higher TCO. Our
budget would not be able to handle that many workstations yearly.

Thanks
AJK

 

You should have engineering on their own server with all workstations
in eng sharing a backbone that isn't shared with anyone else in the
company.

You also need to have an aggressive policy regarding internet apps,
internet browsing, downloading files, attachments like videos on email
messages and listening to streaming radio. This stuff kills network
performance.

If you have a 100 users and aren't enforcing a net usage policy then
you can be sure that at least a couple are listening to streaming radio
at any time.

That might solve your network problem but it'll obviously cost you.

The imported geometry is definitely a pain that I've experienced before
and I don't know if there's really a workaround.

How many parts and assemblies are in your top level? How many top level
mates? Are parts more feature intensive than is required? How many
incontext relationships do you have? I realize that modelling 100%
parametrically is attractive but you pay a big speed price for it.

Typically I use parametrics for layout but break relationships as parts
get released. This speeds up your assemblies and also means that
released parts can't get changed by accident, a rev needs to be forced.

 

A very valid argument from your users indeed and hard to counter. This
is one of those realism vs performance trade-offs. I just went thru a
go around here and found that I got a really really really vast
improvement in open-to-edit time from loading assemblies lightweight.
The resolution reduction and lighweight load are not tied at the hip.
My suspicion here is that I got an 80% improvement out of lightweight &
another 20 out of resolution, but I did not validate that with testing.

I do know that a fully resolved load was taking about 25 minutes and a
lighweight load is now taking under 1 minute.

It seems that you have a great handle on hardware and what you have
seems to fit the bill. It's funny but before we used the lightweight
load, we were all in a "let's upgrade" mode. We are not there any
more. Of course there is always the person who actually likes the 25
minute load and the complaining that comes along with it - personally I
like lightweight alot now since my workflow is no longer inhibited by
needless computer grinding.

Let us know what you find out.

Later,

SMA

 

What's wrong with the check in interface? What are you comparing it to?
You're complaining about cost issues with PDMW? PDMWorks is the least
expensive PDM app around, plus its already paid for except for the non-
sw user access. For non-sw users, you have the options of the web
portal or floating standalone clients, depending how many of them or if
they need r/w access.

No one can help you with vague "political issues". You've got a
problem, you've got a solution, but you won't use the solution. Your
main problem isn't the network (but engineering is usually on its own
server). Will management go to bat for you at all or are they the
"political issue"?

The one thing about politics is that you're not going to please everyone
regardless of what you do. Once you accept that, just do what you think
is right. Allowing a business to be paralyzed by politics is a crime of
cowardice.

You mentioned springs and wires. Certainly springs can be removed from
the imported model. Things with a lot of unnecessary detail like that
will definitely kill you. Look at how much detail you need and how
often you need it. Turn it off when you don't need it.

When you have to make references to the imported geometry, consider
having a part that only has the necessary faces created by knitting
faces of the import

On my recent job with imported data, I found that a "heal edge" feature
at the top of the tree got stuck with a perpetual rebuild symbol, so
everything I did like opening or closing a sketch, it had to rebuild 90
features back to that heal feature. Keep an eye out for things like
that. Also, run the Tools, Check on your import. Even if it looks like
it has no errors (no cherries or lemons), there can still be bad faces,
which cause problems.

It sounds like your users are more comfortable in Pro/E. CAD is not
religion. Why don't you stay on Pro? More "political issues"?

Then why don't you use Pro/E?

Doing the right thing is often unpopular, sometimes even just doing what
it takes to get the job done is unpopular. I can't tell you what the
right thing is, but it looks like you're having problems with that.
Using SolidWorks isn't going to mean you buy new workstations every
year, but it may mean that you need to learn or develop new techniques
for dealing with stuff.

 

As far as hardware goes I have been running an AMD64 FX53 for a year
now. It has only been bested once on a benchmark by another AMD and
then only by a fraction of a percent.

Which benchmarks are you using?

I would suggest SPECapc Solidworks and Pro/E, Ship in a Bottle, STAR2.1
and Patbench. SPECapc is more a graphics test, Ship in a Bottle
combines graphics and processor. Run Ship in a Bottle with graphics set
to Fast, Slow, HLR on and HLR off to get a good idea of what your
system can do. If you have a fast system you should get around 18
seconds with graphics set to fast and HLR off. STAR is strictly CPU
and Patbench is heavy on memory bandwidth. Patbench will run your
machine out of memory if you set it to 12 or more iterations.

 

I have been using SPECapc 2005 with sp3, running both local and accross
the network. I have been finding some very valid weak machines, none
of our first generation cad workstations are performing very well.
Some of the newer machines are performing very well my fastest over
time is 335 sec from a HP XW4200, 3.6 P4 2gb memory and fx3400
graphics. Interesting that running the test with data files stored on
network yeilded a time of 450 sec.

I am considering going dual opteron simply from the fact that my
solidworks designers are not just designers but project managers as
well. They typically have two or three applications open including
solidworks. Outlook, Project, Encompix (erp/mrp system) which they
need to do their jobs.

Thanks
AJK

 

Matt,

The political issues I speak are what lead us to solidworks, it was a
compromise. We had/have 5 users running pro/e and the other 8 running
autocad. The president of the company wanted to go solids accross the
board, so a selection process insued. Becasue of some bad dealing's
with pro/e sales people in the past they were given a less then
favorable review, even though we already had the product and had been
sucessfully using it with 5 users, we had no problems with the product
or support. When the selection of solidworks came down, the pro/e
people didn't care for the idea but were not give much choice.

Becasue of the way work flows are here department managers wanted and
needed the ability to view a projects files at their current design
state at any moment. If users didn't regularly check in to the vault
their managers would be able to check up on them.

Believe me I know what the correct implementation should have been, but
the culture change was just to great for some of my
designer/engineers/project managers, they couldn't hardly cope and some
autocad users didn't see the need for a 3d package.

PDM/works or another PDM will be deployed on a new file server which
will be on an isolated VLAN and backbone. I will also be deploying
gigabit to the desktops for engineering.

 

I keep a Win98 box next to my desk for the office chores. Then my CAD
box does only CAD. With a KVM switch it is a snap to switch machines on
a single monitor. I have considered using RealVNC to eliminate the KVM
switch also. The problem with dual Opteron's for this application is
just that the one doing office chores probably will cost you as much as
a cheapo computer just for those low impact tasks. Since SW doesn't
utilize the second processor it will not help performance although it
might on Pro/E or ACAD. By playing with task priority you can minimize
CPU contention with a single CPU. See XPTC on how to set that in the
registry. I run FEA for hours while running SW and don't really notice
a slowdown. For example for the last week and a half the idle process
only shows 29 hours. During that time a number of very long FEA jobs
ran while I was using SW and while I was home.

Again, look at the code for SPECapc and see what they are really
measuring. Did network vs local change the CPU or I/O scores much?