Two versions of SW2005 in task manager

Hi,

I have one particluar project with millions of little teeth and lots of
difficult surfaces, which has enormous rebuild times and is generally
difficult to work with. In particular I find that if I roll back up the tree
to try and fix or delete something Solidworks will freeze, with my processor
showing about 50% constant, and two versions of SW in the Applications
window with both of them 'not responding'.

My machine is new, CAD2 Imagine with 3.6Ghz, 2GB Ram, 128 Graphics -
basically it's a monster so shouldn't have this kind of trouble. I have
WinXP Pro SP2 (for what it's worth) and SW2005 SP01.1

Anyone else seen similar things?

Now I have to

 

It is quite frequent after a crash having SW not unloading from memory, thus
if you re-load SW, you end up with 2 in the task manager.

And so far (that I know, SW2004 here), nothing prevents you from launching a
second session of SW on the same machine.

HIH
JM

 

You will frequently find two SW applications running instead of one. I
know of no explanation for this. In task manager you will see just one.
SW generally spawns several threads when it starts, but only one
usually does all the lifting.

Sounds like a good benchmark problem for real world SW users.

 

Your processor indicating 50% useage is indicative of having hyperthreading
enabled. If this is the case, I'd disable it. SWx benefits so little from
hyperthreading and seems to have so many issues with it, that disabling it
may solve one or more issues that you are having. You have to disable it
from your bios setup screen.

 

I don't have a hyperthreading capable processor and still heve this
effect from time to time.

 

My comments.

The second running process you see when loading a part is what allows you to
rotate the model, etc as the part is still loading. Once it fully loads,
that process goes away.

If you have hyperthreading on, turn it off. Think about what's happening -
sure, it sounds like a good idea to be able to work on other things as SW is
crunching away. But with only one processor, what hyperthreading does is
take all the available processor power and divide it into two parts - one
part for SW (in this case) and the other part for other applications. Now,
when you are working in SW, do you really want to cut its available
processing power in half?? Not me - I want SW to get all that I can give it
because that's the job at hand that is the most important to me at that
time.

Millions of little teeth? Sounds to me like a nightmare. Do you really
need an accurate depiction of all those teeth? Can some be suppressed or
simplified? Look for things like this to make it go faster.

WT

 

Yes, I often get the exact same situation, except that my processor is
usually pegged. I've never been able to figure out why there are two
applications showing. Sometimes the second application is a window with a
message or question, but that doesn't seem to be the case when it gets in
this state.

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