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jguest82179
2005-09-13, 12:21 AM
Can anyone tell me what, from their experience, constitutes a "large" assembly?

We have an assembly here that is bogging our Dell Precision 670 workstations (3.4GHz Xeon, 4Gb DDR2 RAM, nVidia Quadro FX3400, 36Gb 15kRPM SCSI, XP Pro with /3GB switch) down to the point where they are barely useable. Zooms and Orbits take up to two or three minutes, calculating constraints can take the same, along with many other delays along the way.

What I am trying to figure out is whether we are actually getting poor performance from our hardware & software combo, or whether we are simply expecting too much.

TIA,...Jon.

jonathan.landeros
2005-09-13, 02:07 AM
Can anyone tell me what, from their experience, constitutes a "large" assembly?

We have an assembly here that is bogging our Dell Precision 670 workstations (3.4GHz Xeon, 4Gb DDR2 RAM, nVidia Quadro FX3400, 36Gb 15kRPM SCSI, XP Pro with /3GB switch) down to the point where they are barely useable. Zooms and Orbits take up to two or three minutes, calculating constraints can take the same, along with many other delays along the way.

What I am trying to figure out is whether we are actually getting poor performance from our hardware & software combo, or whether we are simply expecting too much.

TIA,...Jon.

The Autodesk website defines a large assembly as something larger than 1000 parts, and has the specs below.

Large assembly design (more than 1,000 parts)

* Intel Pentium 4, Intel Xeon, or AMD Opteron™ processor, 3 GHz or higher
* 3 GB or more RAM
* 3.5 GB free disk space
* 128 MB or more OpenGL-capable workstation class graphics card

Have you tried copying files from the network to the local drive? I've seen a case or two where the network has killed an assembly's performance. You might also double check your video card driver and settings to make sure your video card is tuned for the best performance.

There's a large assembly performance doc on the link below that also may have some suggestions.
http://www.kwikmcad.com/iclips/documents.asp

There's also some good info on www.sdotson.com with respect to assembly performance, as well as skeletal and muscular modeling, which have some other suggestions that might help with performance.

I hope these tips help. Sorry I could provide a magic bullet.

Jonathan

jguest82179
2005-09-13, 05:01 AM
Large assembly design (more than 1,000 parts)

* Intel Pentium 4, Intel Xeon, or AMD Opteron™ processor, 3 GHz or higher
* 3 GB or more RAM
* 3.5 GB free disk space
* 128 MB or more OpenGL-capable workstation class graphics card

Well, the assembly that is causing the problem has about 1200 parts, so I guess it does qualify as a large assembly.However, as I said before, we have machines that well surpass these requirements, however our performance appears to be abysmal.

Our machines are Dell Precision 670's with:

3.4GHz Xeon CPU's
4Gb DDR2 RAM (400Mhz)
36Gb, 15,000RPM SCSI HDD (15Gb+ free)
nvidia Quadro FX 3400 256Mb, 256-Bit PCI-e workstation graphics card


Have you tried copying files from the network to the local drive? I've seen a case or two where the network has killed an assembly's performance.

After initially trying to work over the network we quickly decided that until our IT dept fixes the issues with it (which would involve them first identifying the issue :rolleyes: ) it was not even remotely feasible to use Inventor over the network. We have some MAJOR issues in that area. Our testing revealed that even when opening a small IDW file on the local HDD the difference in time between having the network cable disconnected versus connected was <3 seconds versus >40 seconds respectively - and that was for the same file on the local disk!



You might also double check your video card driver and settings to make sure your video card is tuned for the best performance.

I have already installed the latest Inventor certified driver from Nvidia and optimized it to what I believe (based on everything I've read & heard so far) to be the best settings for Inventor.

I guess what i really would like to know is this:

"Does everyone else who is working with large (1000+ part) assemblies have similar issues? Or am I just expecting too much of the hardware?"

jonathan.landeros
2005-09-13, 07:53 AM
Well, the assembly that is causing the problem has about 1200 parts, so I guess it does qualify as a large assembly.However, as I said before, we have machines that well surpass these requirements, however our performance appears to be abysmal.

Our machines are Dell Precision 670's with:

3.4GHz Xeon CPU's
4Gb DDR2 RAM (400Mhz)
36Gb, 15,000RPM SCSI HDD (15Gb+ free)
nvidia Quadro FX 3400 256Mb, 256-Bit PCI-e workstation graphics card



After initially trying to work over the network we quickly decided that until our IT dept fixes the issues with it (which would involve them first identifying the issue :rolleyes: ) it was not even remotely feasible to use Inventor over the network. We have some MAJOR issues in that area. Our testing revealed that even when opening a small IDW file on the local HDD the difference in time between having the network cable disconnected versus connected was <3 seconds versus >40 seconds respectively - and that was for the same file on the local disk!




I have already installed the latest Inventor certified driver from Nvidia and optimized it to what I believe (based on everything I've read & heard so far) to be the best settings for Inventor.

I guess what i really would like to know is this:

"Does everyone else who is working with large (1000+ part) assemblies have similar issues? Or am I just expecting too much of the hardware?"


Hmmm. I'm not exactly sure what's causing it. I'm not working with assemblies that size. Everything I deal with tends to be below 200 parts, so I don't have anything to compare to.

For what it's worth, I'm not noticing a large hit on those parts. I work locally, but a 250 part assembly is opening in less than a minute, and I have no issues (other than minor detail drop) during rotation.

I'm running the following.

3.2 Ghz Processor
1 GB RAM
128 ATI Fire GL V3100 (never monkeyed with the driver, I don't notice any issues).
160 GB SATA Drive
Win XP Pro SP2 (no 3 GB switch)

I know it's not a linear line between 200 and 1200, but it seems like with a screaming machine like yours, you shouldn't be THAT far off my performance.

Are the parts really complicated, with lots of features and surfaces, chrome textures or something? To a certain extent I'm guessing, but it seems like you shouldn't be getting hit that bad.

jguest82179
2005-09-13, 08:11 AM
I know it's not a linear line between 200 and 1200, but it seems like with a screaming machine like yours, you shouldn't be THAT far off my performance.

That's what I thought too. :(


Are the parts really complicated, with lots of features and surfaces, chrome textures or something? To a certain extent I'm guessing, but it seems like you shouldn't be getting hit that bad.

Well I wouldn't have thought that many of the parts could be called complex, the assembly's largely comprised of manually constructed piping runs, flanges, valves, etc. plus a little structural steelwork. No shiny surfaces at all as far as I know, let alone chrome.

I've completely hit a wall when it comes to diagnosing here, and I'm usually not too bad at it. The really sad part is that we've bought five of these workstations and not one of them is performing to a standard that I would call acceptable for the price we paid for them.

In fact, they perform on average about 20-25% better than my home PC which is an Athlon XP 3000 w/ 768Mb PC3200 DDR-RAM, 128Mb Radeon 9200, and 80Gb IDE HDD running Win XP Pro.

Ah well, maybe management might listen next time when I recommend custom built systems for this application......HAHAHAHA!! NOT LIKELY!!!

robertb.65723
2005-09-22, 08:32 PM
I've had large assemblys with over 2000 parts which performed well on my pc and I've also had complex single parts with things like arrays of 4000 holes which have really bogged my pc. Its all about keeping it as simple as possible while still having enough info to build something. Dont go down to nuts and bolt details unless you really need to. My Pc is a HP Workstation XW4100, 3.4 GHz, 2GB Ram, Nvidia FX1100, Windows XP Pro, SP 2, Running Inventor 10 Series.

jguest82179
2005-09-22, 11:38 PM
I've had large assemblys with over 2000 parts which performed well on my pc and I've also had complex single parts with things like arrays of 4000 holes which have really bogged my pc. Its all about keeping it as simple as possible while still having enough info to build something. Dont go down to nuts and bolt details unless you really need to. My Pc is a HP Workstation XW4100, 3.4 GHz, 2GB Ram, Nvidia FX1100, Windows XP Pro, SP 2, Running Inventor 10 Series.

I understand what you are saying, and we have kept it as simple as possible right from the start as we knew that it was going to get pretty huge. We have not included any of the nuts and bolts or anything like that as it would have added at least another 5000 parts to do so, and there are only a handful of very small simple arrays in the whole assembly.