Big Drawings - Inventor Freezes

[robertb.65723]

Firstly I'de have to say Inventor is pretty stable but when opening/refreshing a drawing of reasonable size Inventor will hang/freeze. It will not crash but will hang for several minutes, sometimes over 20 minutes. When I look at the CPU & Ram usage I find the computer is not really working overtime. While it is hanging Inventor does not seem to use over 50% of the CPU (P4 3.4GHz) and does not use more than 600MB of RAM (1GB avaliable). Has anyone else noticed this? Is there a way to make the computer work harder so that my drawings dont hang so long? Could it be a graphics card issue....its got a NVIDIA FX1100.

[jguest82179]

Hi Robert,

We're having similar issues with our Inventor Drawings.

From what I have read so far I have not found a workable solution to our problem. My first thought would have been that if you can afford to then you really should add some more RAM. However the effectiveness of this approach is still yet to be proven, we have just gone from 2 Gig of DDR2 RAM up to 4 Gig but I am yet to see a significant gain for the money.

We are using some quite large assemblies and so our part count can be over 1500 parts, this results in memory usage of over 1.5 Gig for opening one IDW drawing file. Previously we were running out of RAM and getting frequent error messages to that end, since adding more RAM the out of memory errors have ceased, but that's it. There has been no noticeable performance increases in any other areas.

As for Inventor not using more than 50% of the processor time, as far as I can tell 50% is as good as it gets with no way to improve this figure. I imagine that it is a part of the software coding that only allows this much, though for the life of me I don't know why 50% percent was the number chosen. I would have thought that 75-80% would have been a much more sensible number.

I wouldn't think that the issue would be with the graphics card, we also use the NVidia Quadro card but in its FX3400 variant and it has proven to be a very robust and reliable card. From memory the FX 1100 is a 128Mb/128-Bit card, is it not? This should be well and truly sufficient unless you are using vast quantities of chromed/glossy finished parts.

If I come up with a workable solution I will update this thread with my findings.

Cheers,...Jon.

[DarrenYoung]

Firstly I'de have to say Inventor is pretty stable but when opening/refreshing a drawing of reasonable size Inventor will hang/freeze. It will not crash but will hang for several minutes, sometimes over 20 minutes. When I look at the CPU & Ram usage I find the computer is not really working overtime. While it is hanging Inventor does not seem to use over 50% of the CPU (P4 3.4GHz) and does not use more than 600MB of RAM (1GB avaliable). Has anyone else noticed this? Is there a way to make the computer work harder so that my drawings dont hang so long? Could it be a graphics card issue....its got a NVIDIA FX1100.
Note sure if this is related to your 50% issue or not but does your task manager report two processors? Even in a single processor machine, if it's hyperthread enabled, it shows as two processors and I believe (I'm not a hardware expert) you only then use 1/2 the processing power in applications that aren't multi-thread enabled. In this case, I think the hyper threading will slow things down in a single applicaiton but speed things up acrocc multiple applicaitons if you are multi-tasking.

[jguest82179]

Note sure if this is related to your 50% issue or not but does your task manager report two processors? Even in a single processor machine, if it's hyperthread enabled, it shows as two processors and I believe (I'm not a hardware expert) you only then use 1/2 the processing power in applications that aren't multi-thread enabled. In this case, I think the hyper threading will slow things down in a single applicaiton but speed things up acrocc multiple applicaitons if you are multi-tasking.

So, continuing along that line of thought, does that mean that If I disable the hyperthreading on my machine that Inventor will be able to use more than 50% of the processor?

I think it might be time for another experiment!! :D