PDMLink cache wiped out.

Engineers at the Raytheon Tewksbury Facility are currently experiencing issue with Pro/E crashing often when working on very large assemblies and the related drawings. They are currently running Wildfire 3 M240 64 bit with 12GB of RAM. The engineers admit to using lot of assembly cuts to speed up the design process, but thought that creating SREPs would allow them to aviod memory issues. They are now spending a lot of time monitoring the Task Manager memory while they work; saving their work before it runs out of memory. These memory concerns takes their mind away from designing (what they want/should spend most of their time doing). No matter what, the engineers still have to be able to continue working on their designs and finishing their tasks. Everyone was really hoping that they would be able to complete their task before running out of memory and having to clean up their designs to make them more efficient.

Questions:

1. Is there any value that can be put in for cache (in Tools > Server Registry) that can stop Pro/E from taking so much memory that it crashes?
2. Since we are also going to PDMLink, will this issue worsen? I understand that Pro/E and PDMLink share the same memory resources unless you split these functions into two processes.
3. Is there any guidelines to help us figure out which assemblies and drawings are becoming too large to work on with our current resources?

The engineers are willing to spend some time to fix up their drawings and assemblies, but they need a quick way to determine when their databases go beyond a recommended memory limit. It takes time to update computers to 64 bit and add memory or to order and setup new 64 bit computers. At this point, the engineers are not able to call up the Master Rep without running out on memory and crashing (they can only call up SREPs). Many of our users runn 32 bit machines with the 3GB switch. However, this adds an element of instability. It seems to make sense to have a maximum target limit for RAM to be under 2GB or maybe even 1.5GB. What is a realistic number (knowing that we are migrating all our data to PDMLink very shortly; many designs are already in PDMLink)? How can databases be split up into multiple files effectively and efficiently so that engineers do not need to be so concerned about others calling up and working on their data? Maybe the answer is to move everyone to Wildfire 5 on 64 bit machines. What do you think is the best plan of action that we can take to address this issue in the long term? My job is to support the engineers in getting their job done on Wildfire and improve the design reuse and collaboration. I also am involved with supporting them in the migration from Intralink to PDM. The engineers, having the issues, are experience users (about 15 years of using Pro/E, Wildfire and Intralink). Drastically changing how these engineers design on Wildfire will be a difficult sell without a good amount to support data to backup our recommendations.

If we can somehow generate some guidelines for our engineering community, then we can avert most issues before they happen. It will also give the Pro/E support team a way to show the urgency of improving their modeling practices and clean up their models consistently thoughout the design cycle. We do not really have the luxury to spend a lot of time analyzing designs to find out what is wrong; this is really supposed to be Model/CHECK's job (with a little bit of human intervention for special conditions).

To prevent data loss when your local cache is corrupted or deleted, add the dm_upload_objects=automatic to your config.pro if you are linked to Windchill. This will cause a background upload to the to the server side workspace whenever you save your file. This also allows your to view your up to date workspace from a standalone browser.