Is my hardware good enough?

[char84]

Hello. I am new to the forum and new to using ProE. Unfortunately my company has not sent me for formal training in ProE and I have found this forum very useful and decided it would be good to become a member.


The 1st question I have is whether my hardware is good enough for the type of work I am expected to do. I have been thrown in the deep end a bit, as I am expected to deal with very large drawings, without training, and noone in my office has ever had experience with such large assembliesandI do not know weather its the user (me)or the hardware at fault.


Hardware: T7500 Dell Workstation, 12gb RAM, Quadro FX 1800


Software: Pro Enginner Wildfire 4.0, Windchill, Windows XP 64bit


Now the Assemblies i work with will have upto 10000parts, sometimes more if i have the complete finished model. I need to use this in Master rep, so no turning off stuffor going to a specific.Getting theassembly to import from a generated .pws to a workspace is how i generally work. This process can take long, the intial generation of the assembly can take an hr, but this is only usually the first open, subsequent opens take alot less time(15mins tops). Working like this is fine as i can let the computer load as i leave work and the next morning it is done!


The problem I am running into is once i start working with the entire assembly, i find after a an hr or sothe whole system progressively gets slow and clunky, and i start getting "Low Virtual Memory" warnings. Eventually if i don't Save and close ProE the system will lock up, resulting in needing to reboot, or a ctrl-alt-delete option needing to be taken...if possible.


What I need answered is this problems with my settings of my PC/Software or is it i just need more RAM and a better Video Card. I have got my hands on a PTC pdf regarding Windchill Client Optimization, which i will get the IT guy to implement over the next few days, but if this doesn't work I'm leaning to RAM being to low...or even just the virtual memory settings???


FYI, i work for a global company so all the work i do is stored on servers overseas and we use Windchill. The drawings are generated by in house software whichgenerates .pws files i canimport (approx 100MB)


Ur advice would be aprreciated!

 

[dr_gallup]

All computers are obsolete the day you place the order.

If you are getting "low virtual memory" you can just increase the amount of swap space the OS is setting aside. This can be huge, there probably is a limit but it is way out there. However, speed will suffer any time you use virtual memory so the best thing you can do for speed is more RAM. You need to see how much you workstation & OS will support, it may not be much more than you have.

A better video card would help but probably not all that much.

One thing to remember is that using Windchill increases memory requirements by something like a factor of 3. So if there is anyway you can run Pro/E without it you would probably completely solve your problem.

 

[AaronMejia]

You seem to have a very decent machine with a good amount of RAM and a good video card, the problem here seems to be that your assemblies are, in fact, quite large.


You may want to try the following:


- Export your workspace to your hard drive and work from there. You will get faster regeneration times and, in case of a crash (which sounds very likely to happen) versioned files are easier to recover than workspace files.


- Clear the event manager from Windchill. Don't ask, just give it a try. I still don't fully understand why it tends to have an impact on stability and performance.


- You say you need to work with the master reps, so there's no hope for simplified reps or shrinkwraps? Try things as simple as using a rep for the screws without any details (threads, slots, dents, etc). Details in screws normally go unnoticed and this simple change can decrease the amount of memory you need by about half, depending on how many times you use the screws and the level of details they have. We ran a test with an assy with around 1000 components, of which 350 were detailed screws. By leaving just the most basic screw features in the rep we reduced the memory consumption about 40%. Your results may vary, but I hope you get the point.


- More RAM would surely help as well as increasing the virtual memory. If you have a RAID capable configuration you may want to consider a RAID 1 or RAID 2 setup. This allows for massivedata transfer rates which you will surelyneed if you are thinking about a monster virtual memorysize. If you only have one hard drive and no RAID controller then it could be expensive to set up.


-The Quadro FX 1800 is reaching its end of life (EOL) and it contains only 768 MB of RAM. It's still a pretty good card, butit sounds like you require more horsepower. For your assemblies you may want to have a newer video card with at least 1GB of faster video memory (DDR5 perhaps?).


- I'm sure you already checked this, but just for the heck of it make sure you are running in OpenGL and not in Direct3D, that your network card is set to full duplex instead of autonegotiation and that you have no fancy wallpaper set on your desktop. I hope it helps.

 

[char84]

Thanks for the info! I will attempt to make the software changes you suggested today, but from what both you say, the realfix is moreRAM, and any other fix would be a band-aid solution.


I will let you know how I go with it.