Improving Performance of Large Assemblies
Large Design Review (LDR) and Lightweight (LW) are great ways of loading your assemblies into session very quickly. However I still come across a lot of customers that prefer to load in fully resolved. Even if you use the tools available (LDR and LW) at some point you are going to have to resolve assemblies so that you can start work on the components.
I like to use the Assembly Visualisation tool (Tools > Assembly Visualisation) to make sure my sub assemblies and parts are rebuilding as fast as possible. You can do this by adding in a column for rebuild times. Select the arrow to the upper right, you are given the option of more columns
On the drop down select “SW Rebuild Time”
When added you can sort by selecting the top of the column, we can now see the slowest and the fastest rebuild times. In the example below a pump is taking in excess of 9 seconds to rebuild.
So I investigate by opening this file and running Feature Statistics (Tools > Feature Statistics). This orders the features by their rebuild time and in this case highlights a single feature that is responsible of 98% of the rebuild time.
Further investigation points to a “Convert Entities” relation. So time to assess whether I need this reference, or perhaps this could be changed or locked. I can save myself over 8 seconds on the rebuilding of just that part alone by locking or removing the on edge relation.
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Michael Hatt is an Applications Engineer at Solid Solutions. He has been working in the Reseller Channel for 8 years in a post sales technical role.
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