SSD make Pro/E lot faster?

[ThomasPhore]

I have a Nehalem Xeon with 12 GB memory, Quadro FX1800, and Windows 7 64. This is a very fast computer. But my Pro/E model runs incredibly slow on it. It really kills my productivity. When I suppress half the features of my models it runs fine, but when everything unsuppressed any regen takes forever.

Is this really CPU-limited or would I get any gains from something like using a SSD? It's just hard for me to imagine such a modern and powerful machine could be so incredibly slow with this. It doesn't really seem much faster than my old Core2D 2.16GHz. But at the same time it doesn't really seem to be using scratch disk or anything -- the memory used is only like 4GB.

Anyone have experience with Pro/E on an SSD and with what exactly it speeds up. If it only speeds up openly models and doesn't speed up regen then I guess I better not spend $400 on an SSD. On the other hand, if it speeds up lots of things then that $400 might be the best hardware investment I ever made.

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[ptc-876037]

I went to using a SSD. It sped up the opening of Pro-E (WF5) from around 40 seconds to 5 seconds. No difference is usage. What your probably seeing is a lack of RAM or Graphics card issue.

[Kevin]

You might try a different graphics card if possible, the one you have is a mid range one. We use the 3500 which is the high end range and still have issues with larger assemblies. There are ultra high end cards but I've never used one.

[ThomasPhore]

I have 12GB of ram but the system never seems to use more than ~4GB so either Windows 7-64 isn't taking advantage of my ram the way it should or shortage of ram isn't the problem...

Do video cards really affect regen times? I would have thought they only affect things like how fast you can rotate an assembly (e.g. in wireframe mode). I thought part and assembly regeneration is completely carried out by the CPU rather than GPU. Is this not the case?

[BurtLand]

Your machine should fly ...

Is it an assembly - how many parts?

Is it a part - how many features?

What version of ProE - 64bit?

Dont know much about assemblies. For parts, watch the command line and check if it gets stuck on any features during rebuild.

Check the features that its slow to build - do an Info>Geometry Checks - correct all errors.

What part accuracy are you running?

[ThomasPhore]

I actually have a lot of geometry check errors and additionally my part accuracies are probably poorly chosen.

As far as the accuracy. Well I started off my project just using the default relative accuracy. But then I ran into problems when merging parts where Pro/E basically wouldn't carry out the merges without me changing accuracy settings. So I increased accuracies on a few parts until the error went away. Admitedly, this is not the smartest way of doing things, but I had a deadline and I just had to go with what seemed best after reading everything I could on accuracy that I could find through Google.

Do you have suggestions on how to approach going back and setting part accuracies so everything works and everything is as fast as possible? Any sorta rules of thumb or anything? In the future, if I know I am going to be merging parts of different sizes, should I start with some absolute values from the outset rather than starting with things in relative accuracy mode? I don't even know how to determine what accuracy to use (what is unecessarily high and what is too low).

The geometry checks are just a mess. I don't even understand the error messages. Do you know of any kind of articles or anything like that with information on how to deal with geometry check errors?

My model is unbelievably slow to the point where it is really killing my productivity. So I'm glad to find out that these are the two areas I should focus on. The only problem is, as an education user, I don't have access to the PTC tutorials and stuff that commercial licensees do and I just generally feel under-equipped to deal with these accuracy and geometry check problems

[DaleMahalko]

The Windows Task Manager can help you evaluate performance problems, though you have to enable some extra columns of information

,

Assuming Windows 7 32/64-bit:

Right-click on a blank area of the task bar, choose "Start Task Manager"

Go to the "Processes" tab

Go to "View" menu, choose "Select columns"

If a program is running out of available memory it will use virtual memory. Each time it swaps with VM, it issues a page fault. High page faults means you need more RAM or something else is using up available memory. Also happens if you have enough programs running at once to use all memory.

• Page faults -- shows total swaps since program was started
  
• Page faults Delta -- number of swaps since last periodic update of task manager stats
  

Hard-working programs need more of the CPU's time. If no programs need to do anything the CPU can go idle.

• CPU % -- (percentage of CPU used per periodic update of task manager stats
  
• CPU Time -- total CPU time used since program was started. Low-usage of less than a second total, after running for hours, is quite possible. A steady ticking away shows heavy usage. Note, can tick "faster" than real time if multiple processors/cores are in use and at high load at the same time.
  

These show all drive activity since program was started, observe this during long delays to see if disk access is the bottleneck:

• Disk I/O Read Bytes
  
• Disk I/O Write Bytes
  

Memory usage:

• Peak Working Set (Memory) -- shows the historical maximum amount of memory used since program was started
  

[DHLewis]

Tom,

It is most likely your GeomChecks and High Accuracy that is causing your model issues. Default Accuracy is .0012 and I might say that going to .0001 would be max. But also you did not mention if you have the config option CPUS_TO_USE set to the number of cores in your system. Have you set that?

Where did the geometry come from, normally if it was Pro/E then you wouldn't have issues and leave the accuracy at the default. If it came from another CAD package then you first need to clean up the Geometry and all the small edges and slivers in the surface model. The Pro-/E tool for cleanup is IDD Import Data Doctor in WF4 and above. You should be able to find a tutorial or two if you search for "Pro-E IDD"

David