File Size Inflation

People have been commenting about the inflation of file sizes with SW04. Ed
Eaton pointed out that SW now saves Parasolid "snapshots" of the model as
you add features. Since my files were reaching truly outrageous proportions,
I decided to do a little EcoSqueeze testing to see how much I could save. I
tried three files--big, medium, and small, just like Goldilocks. File sizes
are in KB

File Original Default -Preview -Display
-Parasolid
Papa 387995 120163 120084 118523
3699
Mama 5915 2793 2730 2146
976
Baby 224 104 91
84 71

As expected, from Ed's description, complex files bloat the most, 32X in my
case. I would submit that SW has gotten carried away with trading file size
for speed.


Jerry Steiger
Tripod Data Systems
"take the garbage out, dear"

 

Jerry,

And how hard would it be for them to put user definable controls in there
that would allow use to "CHOOSE" (a word SW doesn't understand) to turn this
off. Or maybe to control the upper limits of this "autobloat" feature.

It's the same type of thinking that has service packs eating up 600mb of
disk space on the "C" drive every time you install one. Some people just
don't have their machines set up in a way that makes this OK.

Regards

Mark

 

Yes, I've noticed the "bloat"; however, the root cause is still
unclear to me.

If you want to see it in action, try the following:

1. Make note (via Windows Explorer, etc.) of the file size of any
uncompressed "legacy" part you may have from SolidWorks 2003 or
earlier.

2. Open the file in SolidWorks 2004 and do nothing other than to save
it as a copy - converted to the latest native format.

(Just the conversion adds noticeably to the file size.)

3. If the part's feature history and sketches are relatively few and
simple, it's interesting (albeit shocking) to recreate them from
scratch in 2004. Then the impact of "bloat" is most evident!

I think the reason a marathon runner straps a diver's weight belt
around his waist is in order to run faster, isn't it?

Is all the new native file baggage really necessary?

Per O. Hoel
______________________________________________________________________________

 

Jerry,

The way your message is displayed on my NG reader (Netscape) has the
columns mis-aligned. Can you suggest a fix, so that I can make sense of
your data?

Sincerely,
Jerry Forcier

 

Sorry about the formatting. It wrapped the lines on Outlook Express as well.
Here it is with a minimal number of spaces between characters so it isn't as
likely to wrap. It may still have the columns aligned badly because of
different fonts. (I'm not smart enough to figure out how to change fonts in
express.)

File Original Default -Preview -Display -Parasolid
Papa 387995 120163 120084 118523 3699
Mama 5915 2793 2730 2146 976
Baby 224 104 91 84 71

If you still can't make heads or tails of it, the important part (to me, at
least) is that the Parasolid information that SW04 added increased the
complex part file size by a factor of 32X, the medium size file by a factor
or 2.2X, and the small file by a factor of 1.2X


Jerry Steiger
Tripod Data Systems
"take the garbage out, dear"