Maximizing SOLIDWORKS Performance

Well it's that time of year again and my team and I are preparing for SOLIDWORKS World 2011.  My team is doing several presentations this year but the one closest to my heart of course is the one Josh Altergott and I are doing together called Maximizing SolidWorks' Performance.  This is the sequel to a presentation that we did last year that was very well recieved.

The premise is this; we got a very nice brand new Dell Workstation to test on.  We built a very large assembly as a test subject.  And finally we wrote a macro that would do a bunch of different operations to the assembly and components to the assembly.  All of these items establish our environment.  The stats are listed below:

Baseline Machine

• Dell Precision 5500
• 6GB RAM
• Dual Core Processor
• 7200 RPM, 1 TB Hard Drive (For file storage)
• Nvidia Quadro FX 4000 Graphics Card
• 3 10000 RPM, 320GB Hard Drives RAID 0 (For OS)

The Baseline Assembly

• 6637 Total Components
• 5862 Parts
• 775 Sub Asseblies
• 170 Top level mates
• 13011 Bodies

What are testing consist of, is changing just one aspect of the environment or modeling methodology and measuring the time difference that is takes for the macro to run vs our baseline.  Our baseline test took 7 hrs and 50 mins to complete.  We are also able to breakdown the benchmark into different categories of operations to better tell what changes effect what types of efforts in SolidWorks.  Aspects that we are measuring include: file opens, closes, saves, modeling, rotations, rebuilds and others.

Some of the things that we are comparing are:

• Different amounts of RAM and different numbers of processors and cores. 
• 2010 vs 2011
• having files saved in the old version vs the new version
• Verification on rebuild turned on vs off
• Files stored on the network vs local
• lightweight vs fully resolved
• optimized user settings vs default
• Different hard drive options
• Different RAID options
• differnt modeling methods
• and much more….

As you can imagine, we are learning a lot from this effort.  We are very excited to present our findings at SOLIDWORKS World and we are hoping that, if you are coming to the event, you will join us for our little portion of it.

Maximizing SOLIDWORKS Performance

Tuesday, January 25, 2011 @ 10:30am in Room 202

I hope to see you there

Adrian Fanjoy

Technical Services Manager