Simplified Rep Size

[carguy333]

Hello All,

I have a large assembly which is composed of several sub assemblies and over 400 unique components. I have created, what I believe are, lightweight reps (in terms of memory usage) of all of the sub assemblies in order to make my top level assembly more managable. However, I am not having as much succes as I would have hoped. I know PTC builds in several useful simplified reps such as the "graphic" rep but I am just not sure how "lightweight" they really are. For instance I have a sub assembly which occurs 40+ times in my top level assembly. Inside that sub assembly are over 200 small parts, a lot of which are internal. What I have done in that particular assembly was created a simplified rep which consists of only the externally visible parts. Thus, my sub assmebly went from 200+ parts to 8. It would seem to me that this rep would be much lighter than the graphics rep of the entire sub assembly but this could be my lack of understanding about what is really going on in the graphics rep.

So now for my question... Is there a way to determine the efficiency or file size of a simplified rep? Also does anyone have any suggestions for improving model performance?

I am running Windows 7 64-bit with PRO/E Wildfire 4.0 - 64-bit with an Intel 2.3GHz i7 processor, 8GB ram, & an NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 1024 MB graphics card.

While I am on the subject of operating systems, with the 64-bit version of WF4 and Windows 7 do I still need to manually do some sort of "GB Switch" in order to take advantage of all the RAM? Or maybe a better question to ask is, is there anything I need to do in order to take advantage of all the RAM my machine has? I recall running the 32-bit version of WF4 on Windows XP one had to manually activate the 3GB switch.

Thanks in advance,

Mike

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[TomD.inPDX]

First, I have not heard of a memory limit on Win7 64bit.

As for simplified reps, I don't know exactly how that works either although I do know that just processing the scene is a big deal. The only other improvements in throughput is to minimize the graphics quality. I found this to be a huge deal in Creo 2.0 after M020. Just go in and set the edge quality to low, turn off textures, turn off transparency, even switch color off. I was waiting 5 minutes to have a drawing refresh with 10 textured views of a simple part. I found I had the edge quality up to 16 and graphics quality to very_high. This killed my performance on drawings. Not -as- notable in the model, but it was certainly an eye-opener.

I don't where these settings are in WF4 but anything that has to do with display will bite into the CPU and GPU.

[carguy333]

Thanks for the quick reply. It seems to have helped a little bit in the model however I have yet to open up the beastly drawing. I'll let you know how that turns out. I hope your recommendations have an impact on the drawing.

Thanks,

Mike

[BillRyan]

Where do the files reside that you are opening? Windchill Workspace, hard drive...

Review the trail file and/or message log for items like CRCs or external references. These can hinder performance. We had a harness assembly that resulted in 72000 lines of the same warning message.

Try the OOTB Config settings to eliminate any possible issue that your config file may be inducing.

PTC has improved performance of opening family tables in newer builds which I believe I saw last year. (use the update advisor to see when this occured as your verison of WF4 may not have the update)

https://www.ptc.com/appserver/cs/update_advisor/update_advisor.jsp

[carguy333]

Hello Bill,

The files exist on a network drive normally but in an effort to speed up performance for this assembly I went ahead and moved them to my local hard drive.

Thanks for the tip regarding updating my version of ProE I will take look at that shortly.

Regards,

Mike

[BillRyan]

It may also help you to understand how objects get called into session...we have a test assembly that has 400 required dependent objects where the simplified rep brings into session 380 of the 400 objects. It takes 70 seconds to open master rep and over 200 seconds to open simplified rep when opening the assembly from Windchill(network server). In Master Rep, the assembly gathers all required components into one packet for transfer and loads the models. With simplfied rep, each node(assembly level) has to be interrogated seperately...thus multiple packets are needed. In our test assembly, there are 69 unique packets versus 1 for master rep. Small delays in network latency can increase load times. You shouldn't experience a big difference if the objects are on the hard drive.

We also have an extremely large assembly that takes 24 minutes to open 400 objects out of a 600,000 object structure assembly. It takes 133 seconds to open the rep after the objects are on the hard drive(client workspace). Creo View opens this in 20 seconds when connected to Windchill...it's quite impressive to see Creo View only load the 400 objects out of the large structure.

[JonathanHodgson]

Are you mostly concerned with load times, or with manipulation once everything's loaded?

Another thing to check for load times, if you're outside Windchill, is your search path - if many of the files called up are not in the working directory or the same directory as the assy; you have a long search path; and the director(y/ies) containing many of the files is/are a long way down the search path, then this can slow loading considerably.

[carguy333]

Hello Jonathan,

Thanks for the reply. I am mostly concerned with manipulation once it loads. I can deal with a long initial load time, it's rendering changes to assembly that are killing me. For instance suppressing an object and rendering the changes can take minutes to execute. As for rotating and zooming in on the model, forget about it. It's so choppy you quickly get lost with where you are...

So far Antonius' recommendations have had the greatest impact.

Thanks,

Mike

[JonathanHodgson]

Hi Mike,

Just spotted you're on WF4 like us. One big thing for spinning and zooming: turn edge display off (and use shaded view).

View -> Display Settings -> Model Display -> Shade tab -> With Edges

It's different in Creo, but makes a big difference in WF4.