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10-Marble
March 6, 2018
Solved

Creo 3 Slow Working on Large Assembly

  • March 6, 2018
  • 3 replies
  • 15970 views

Using Creo 3 M010. I have a large assembly and a drawing with 16 sheets. It's very slow to work with. I must click on a drawing view, wait 5 seconds, perform my action, wait 5-15 seconds for it to update, then repeat this process over and over. I can't even get RMB to show up on some views.

 

I have a quad core watercooled i7 3Ghz, 12Gb DDR3, 5870 GPU (watercooled), 500Gb Samsung Evo SSD. My machine is no slouch. What I don't understand is what's limiting Creo. CPU usage remains below 20%, RAM below 8Gb, SSD below 5%, GPU below 5%. I've tried changing the GPU config options (opengl/win32_gdi) and nothing seems to help. If software is running slowly, I can always point to a limiting component of hardware, but with Creo, there's nothing to point to.

Best answer by dschenken

The processor/OS is probably attempting to parallelize the single execution stream for Creo by spreading it across multiple cores, shortening the fetch time, but then blocking when waiting for previous instructions to finish. In any case, the effort to parallelize an application is daunting as it requires managing access to shared memory by multiple processes.

 

Even now it may be worthwhile to create simplified reps, including part simplified reps to deal with the unnecessary threads. If the customer or whoever won't allow that, recall that recently an Uber driver pulled a $1600 fare from someone who should have known better. OTOH it may be you accepted this task for a flat fee and in the future you will know better.

3 replies

23-Emerald IV
March 6, 2018

Except in a few special cases, Creo is limited to the single core speed of the processor.  100% CPU usage of one core will show up as 25% CPU usage (with hyperthreading off or 13% with hyperthreading on.)  More than likely the bottleneck is the CPU.  This is why overclocking is so helpful with Creo.

 

There are some techniques to speed up drawing performance with large assemblies.  You should be able to find them by digging around here on the community.

23-Emerald III
March 6, 2018

On the large drawings, I use the selection filter in the bottom RH corner. It helps a lot when you know you are going to be selecting certain types of items repetitively. 

Learn and use simplified reps extensively. Manage them agressively. Use them in your drawings. 

 

Large assy drawings are horrible. 

 

10-Marble
March 6, 2018

Agreed. Unfortunately I am tasked with performing revisions to a large assembly that was not modeled... smartly. No simplified reps, all fasteners have modeled threads, etc. So I have to work with what I have.

 

I've seen conflicting information about multithreading in Creo. From my experience, it seems like it is. I notice all 8 cores (w/ HT) showing about even usage. Definitely not the typical one-core-maxed-out while all others are at 5%, that is common with single threaded applications.

 

I had found this on PTC support which helped:

http://support.ptc.com/carezone/tutorials/files/advdraw_site/Large_Assembly/Large_assy_D.htm

 

But not enough to write home about.

 

dschenken1-VisitorAnswer
1-Visitor
March 6, 2018

The processor/OS is probably attempting to parallelize the single execution stream for Creo by spreading it across multiple cores, shortening the fetch time, but then blocking when waiting for previous instructions to finish. In any case, the effort to parallelize an application is daunting as it requires managing access to shared memory by multiple processes.

 

Even now it may be worthwhile to create simplified reps, including part simplified reps to deal with the unnecessary threads. If the customer or whoever won't allow that, recall that recently an Uber driver pulled a $1600 fare from someone who should have known better. OTOH it may be you accepted this task for a flat fee and in the future you will know better.

1-Visitor
March 9, 2018
It seems more likely your problems are seated in the model.

What does the message log look like after opening/regenerating the model in a new session?
There should be no warnings and especially no errors.