Solidworks 2019, What’s New Series- Performance Evaluation Tool

Often times while working on a project we build components, and then put these together to form sub-assemblies and assemblies. While working on the large assemblies, we realise that Solidworks starts to slow down. This can be due to a few reasons including level of details in one or more components, rebuild errors, files located on network location, older version components files or even the image quality used for each component.

An important tool getting ignored often, which could play a vital role in improving the overall performance of your assembly to a much comfortable level, called assembly “performance evaluation” tool was introduced to drill down the culprits causing general slow performance, and helps mitigating the issue.

A few performance affecting options can be seen in the “performance evaluation” tool such as;

1.Open performance generally indicates a few reasons that could have caused the assembly to open slow, such as:

-As for this assembly, a list of components in ascending order according to their opening time contribution can be seen in ‘details of the open document file’ window.

-There are 11 components in this assembly still old version files, thus hindering opening performance.

-3 documents were not updated. SWx had to update whilst opening the assembly hence causing a delay in opening.

2. Similarly, display performance identifies there are potentially one/more components causing slow graphics performance, due to:

-A list of components is generated showing total triangles for each component, representing components with large number of tessellation triangles, causing a slow performance.

-Furthermore, ‘shaded image quality’ shows components with high image quality set in their respective documents’ properties.

3. Rebuild performance is informational and shows a total number of mates within the assembly, other assembly issues like ‘in-context relations’, and rebuild times.

4. Setting performance informs if recommended system settings were considered for the assembly such as ‘large assembly mode’ for assemblies having more than X number of components.

5. Statistics, lastly shows a more detailed information about total number of parts, sub-assemblies contained in the top-level assembly.

Typically, we would choose to show a list of files for any of the above-mentioned reports/warnings and the components by clicking “show these files”:

A list gets presented which allows you to either generate a report of list or copy/print the list so that these files could be opened and worked on.

In Solidworks 2019, the list popup window can be seen as:

Now, just by highlighting a file name in the list lets us open the file directly from the tool to work on it, save and rebuild the assembly so that results can be seen straight away.

This addition can be a massive aid in evaluating and fixing issues in the assemblies, quicker than before.

Ahmad Muhammad
Applications Engineer
Central Innovation, Perth

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