Working on a maped network drive

[ekueku]

I am currently working with a quite small assy (about 20 parts) but not located in my comuter. CADdata is in another computer and I have a drive letter assigned to a shared directory. The acces to the data becomesextremly slow. It takes a lot of time to load files and, when regenerating, it stands with 100% of progress bar for 30 sec before unlocks.


Of course, I know that working with remote data cannot be as fast as working local, but there must besomething else. While waiting, I can see that ethernet usage is under 1%.


Is there any parameter in config.pro to make this access faster?? Maybe I have to configure something of my network??


Thank you all in advance!

 

[AHA-D]

There's more to network speed than just your personal connection. There is server speed which might be slower than what the connection can handle, but most of all there is server performance. When lots of other users are also requesting data from the server you're only getting a fraction of the total power. Look at it like a highway where your computer is on one of the connections. When there's no traffic your "trucks" of data requests get on without problems and return with the goods in no time. When there's heavy traffic it's difficult to get on the highway, instead of having a whole convoy there's barely one truck at a time starting and returning. So you're kept waiting while the other traffic gets handled.


Best way to handle this is making a local copy of everything you need and move it back when done. This can of course not be done when you're in concurrent engineering.

 

[ekueku]

Uhm... ok, I understand.


Any good (and cheap!) idea to be in concurrent engineering (without intralink)??


By now, the computer that contains the CAD data runswithWindows XP Pro Workstation. Do you thinkthat a dedicated server would work better? May I use a conventional PC with Windows 2003 Server?? Will it be faster, then? And, what about Xenon pressesors is it worth using them?


thanks!!

 

[AHA-D]

Things should work better with a dedicated server (running Win 2003 server). Connecting computers "on the fly" works but then there's one computer in the group functioning as "master browser". What computer is chosen depends on Windows version and order of login. There can be conflicts in such a situation with long wait states as a result. Having a dedicated server keeps all the administration on one identifiable computer that doesn't have any other tasks than handling communication. So this should definitely improve things. Equally important is the number of users on the network and their demands. Remember that power is split over all users.

 

[ekueku]

Ok, I will bought a server with windows 2003 server.


Thanks!

 

[dr_gallup]

Make sure that your trail file is being written on your local drive, not across the network. Because Pro/E writes small amounts of data to the trail file with every mouse click it will bog down waiting for the net each time. If you have 100 mbps network connection to the server it should not slow down your workstation. I work across a network all day long.