Continue to Site

Welcome to MCAD Central

Join our MCAD Central community forums, the largest resource for MCAD (Mechanical Computer-Aided Design) professionals, including files, forums, jobs, articles, calendar, and more.

dropping out of wildfire

xr-cooper

New member
We have 12 users on Wildfire using a variety of different machines. Myself and another user with identical machines, are dropping completely out of Pro 5-10 times a day. We work with parts, assemblies and drawings and the drop outs happen in any situation in the middle of a variety of commands. It's probably happens the most during zooming and scrolling. We're running Dells with plenty of memory, huge hard drives, and 3Dlabs Wildcat VP870 graphics drivers.


Any ideas?


Tom
 
probably has something to do with the shift key. I call it crash
on demand. I noticed it sometimes that when I crash it has
something to do with the shift key.
 
How much is plenty of memory? I have seen a lot of issues like you are describing because of the graphics card. Have you tried to see if 3D labs has an updated driver for that card? That card only has 128 on it according to looking it up on the internet.
 
My system has 1G of memory. I talked with 3Dlabs yesterday and installed the latest driver and a plug-in, but it still dropped out a couple of times this morning. I'm also having an issue with Internet Exporer where Windows wants to shut it down almost immediately after getting in. Given how much Wildfire seems to be integrated with IE, I wonder if that is somehow related.
 
Hey xr-cooper,

On our old systems, and PTC said this is why the majority of the crashes occur, you would always see a message appear on the dashboard just before Pro/Engineer Wildfire 1.0 crashed. The message said "Out of Memory-Fatal Error". At the time, we had systems with 1 GB of RAM. We called PTC several times on the issue and they said if you are going to open very large assemblies (which we had), at least 2 GB is recommended. We now have workstations with 2 GB and crashes for the most part (some have occured) have gone.

I am not saying it is definetly a memory issue (could be the video card), but I would always shoot for at least 2 GB on any Wildfire system.

xr-cooper, if you want some documents I have from PTC support concerning 3Dlabs cards (not your speicifc card since it is not in the database), e-mail me.

By the way, I don't know if you know or not, your card is one of the offical supported cards of PTC Pro/Engineer so I am guessing if you are using the correct drivers for the card, it is something else.

Hope this helps.


Edited by: acook
 
I have used hi-end CAD applications since 1988 not just Pro/E and like
racing motocross if you don't crash once per day you ain't ridding hard
enough.



acook has some interesting ideas for crashing less. "One day I will own a four gig machine"
 
I used to have crashes everyday like you are experiencing. I run a Dell650 precision and hda 1G. One thing you might try is to go into dispolay settingd and see how mich detail you are trying to drive, especially hidden lines. They can eat a lot of memory.


I finally upgraded my memory to 4G and the crashes went away as did a few other nagging problems I didnt even know I had.
 
Probably won't be a ton of help, but you can add the environmental variable in Control Panel>System>Advanced>Environmental Variables


ALLOW_CRASH


and set the value to TRUE.


This will make Pro pause before exiting and write a file called traceback.log in the working directory. This can sometimes help diagnose a problem, though I tend to go with the graphics driver theory. One test, albeit one that will degrade performance while testing, is to set your graphics mode from OpenGL to Win32_gdi and see if it keeps crashing.


Also, 1gb of RAM isn't really all that much. Just idling, my Precision 670 uses 311 Mb. Unless you're willing to enable the 3Gb switch, going to 4Gb won't help Pro unless you run a lot of different applications simultaneously (XP can't allocate much more than 1.9Gb per application)


128Mb of video ram is probably more than enough as well. You'd be surprised how little video RAMPro really needs. I can't find the article, but I think it was something like 10Mb for 1280x1024.


Regards
 

Sponsor

Articles From 3DCAD World

Back
Top