Inventor 7 performance and RAM usage

[Mike123]

I have a Compaq 2.4Ghz Pentium 4 PC with 2Gb of RAM and a GeForce4 MX 440 graphics card (in true colour) running Windows 2000 professional and Inventor 7.0 service pack 1. The PC was specifically bought to allow an upgrade for 6.0 to 7.0 (6.0 was slow on my old machine and Autodesk recommend 1.5Gb or RAM for assemblies in 7.

The problem I have is that in assemblies of 50 parts and in shaded and exploded views of those assemblies speed is very poor - I see more of the hourglass than anything else.
I have opened Windows task manager and noticed that Inventor is only using 150Mb of RAM and 550Mb of virtual memory despite there being 1.5Gb of physical memory free.

Is there any way to force Inventor to use physical memory instead of virtual which I assume would speed things up

When I try to reduce the size of the swap file in Windows control panel, Windows just increases it later when Inventor requests it.

I would appreciate any suggestions

[Anonymous]

Which driver are you using for your Geforce 4? That
can make a big difference.

When you say speed is poor, is it graphics
performance or general speed of modelling (i.e waiting for parts to
update)

Is there a lot of adaptivity in the assembly?
Switch off adaptivity for any parts which don't require it.

Your machine sounds like it should be pretty quick
as it is well specced, your graphics card isn't really suited to CAD (more of a
games card) but with the right driver it should be pretty good.

HTH

Rory

style="PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #000000 2px solid; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">

"Mike123" <
href="mailto:measton@chalmit.com">measton@chalmit.com> wrote in message

href="news:f17a039.-1@WebX.maYIadrTaRb">news:f17a039.-1@WebX.maYIadrTaRb...

I
have a Compaq 2.4Ghz Pentium 4 PC with 2Gb of RAM and a GeForce4 MX 440
graphics card (in true colour) running Windows 2000 professional and Inventor
7.0 service pack 1. The PC was specifically bought to allow an upgrade for 6.0
to 7.0 (6.0 was slow on my old machine and Autodesk recommend 1.5Gb or RAM for
assemblies in 7.

The problem I have is that in assemblies of 50 parts and in shaded and
exploded views of those assemblies speed is very poor - I see more of the
hourglass than anything else.
I have opened Windows task manager and
noticed that Inventor is only using 150Mb of RAM and 550Mb of virtual memory
despite there being 1.5Gb of physical memory free.

Is there any way to force Inventor to use physical memory instead of
virtual which I assume would speed things up

When I try to reduce the size of the swap file in Windows control panel,
Windows just increases it later when Inventor requests it.

I would appreciate any suggestions

[Anonymous]

------=_NextPart_001_000B_01C3511D.1E687710
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

A good solution is not to go so high in resolution and in colors with =
that card.=20
I've got the same card on my computer using IV7 Sp1. By going down to 16 =
bit color and using a resolution 1280x1024 it runs fast.

You should also try this setup:



--=20
Regards

Ole Christer Lilledal
www.globalmaritime.no
------=_NextPart_001_000B_01C3511D.1E687710
Content-Type: text/html;
charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable



charset=3Diso-8859-1">

A good solution is not to go so high in =
resolution=20
and in colors with that card.

I've got the same card on my computer =
using IV7=20
Sp1. By going down to 16 bit color and using a resolution 1280x1024 it =
runs=20
fast.

You should also try this setup:

style=3D"FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'Times New Roman'; =
mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; =
mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA"> height=3D642 =
src=3D"cid:000501c3510c$49007510$1b00a8c0@globalmaritime.lan.stvg"=20
width=3D529 v:shapes=3D"_x0000_i1025">

--
Regards

Ole Christer Lilledal
href=3D"http://www.globalmaritime.no">www.globalmaritime.no

IV>

------=_NextPart_001_000B_01C3511D.1E687710--

[Mike123]

The driver is version 40.72 and I have tried the different optimisation settings without no difference found. The problem I am having is that Inventor slows right down when I have medium to large assemblies open and 2D drawings created from them. Everything including zooming, rotating, updates, refreshes even waiting for the green dot to appear when I put my cursor at the end of a line is affected. There is very little adaptivity in use as I find it can be unpredictable in complex assemblies. Although I think the graphics card might be a part of it I think there is more to it than that.
I am running in 1280x1024 which is about the lowest resolution that is comfortable on a 21" monitor. Using 16 or 32 bit colour seems to make little difference.
Thanks for your comments

[Anonymous]

A good check to see if this is a problem (Swaped vs
in memory pages) is to go into the task manager an on the processes tab, do
view->select columns and tick the page faults and the page fault delta
columns.   Then go to inventor and do something that causes the hour
glass, if the page fault delta is massive > 2000/s and stays there while the
hour glass is up, then something is wrong.  Every time memory is swaped
between the page file and main memory you get a page fault.

style="PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #000000 2px solid; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">

"Mike123" <
href="mailto:measton@chalmit.com">measton@chalmit.com> wrote in message

href="news:f17a039.-1@WebX.maYIadrTaRb">news:f17a039.-1@WebX.maYIadrTaRb...

I
have a Compaq 2.4Ghz Pentium 4 PC with 2Gb of RAM and a GeForce4 MX 440
graphics card (in true colour) running Windows 2000 professional and Inventor
7.0 service pack 1. The PC was specifically bought to allow an upgrade for 6.0
to 7.0 (6.0 was slow on my old machine and Autodesk recommend 1.5Gb or RAM for
assemblies in 7.

The problem I have is that in assemblies of 50 parts and in shaded and
exploded views of those assemblies speed is very poor - I see more of the
hourglass than anything else.
I have opened Windows task manager and
noticed that Inventor is only using 150Mb of RAM and 550Mb of virtual memory
despite there being 1.5Gb of physical memory free.

Is there any way to force Inventor to use physical memory instead of
virtual which I assume would speed things up

When I try to reduce the size of the swap file in Windows control panel,
Windows just increases it later when Inventor requests it.

I would appreciate any suggestions

[Mike123]

I have tried your suggestion and the page fault delta value is varying between 100 and 600 but occasionally jumps to 1100 and 2400 but only momentarily although it did jump once to 38000 for half a second. However, I'm not quite sure the implications of this and what can be done about it. Do these values indicate a problem?

[rllthomas]

If your ram usage is low and things are slow that usually means ....... ram isn't your problem. You might want to post a jpeg of your parts (although I'll never see it because my web interface doesn't work right) so people can see the type of assembly. 50 complex parts (fillets, draft, arrays) can bring IV to a standstill just as easily as 10,000 simple ones.

You might want to post the results of the hardware diagnostics screen too.

[Anonymous]

Ole

It appears to me you are coming here on the Web side. If that is the case then I am not
sure why the attachments aren't working, but if you are using a newsreader, use the Attach
button instead of insert.

--
Kent
Assistant Moderator
Autodesk Discussion Forum Moderator Program


"Ole Christer Lilledal" wrote in message
news:726C19E8D4B03D2B5386AE5F06914885@in.WebX.maYIadrTaRb...
A good solution is not to go so high in resolution and in colors with that card.

[Anonymous]

I am willing to check your confidential data here at autodesk. I have a ftp
site where you can post your data to me. Are you interested? What I can
provide is a data point on a different machine. If the dataset runs good
here then your PC needs some work. If your dataset is slow then I can bring
this to the attention of development using your dataset.

Thank you for supporting Inventor.

Tom McNeil
Autodesk

"rllthomas" wrote in message
news:f17a039.6@WebX.maYIadrTaRb...
If your ram usage is low and things are slow that usually means ....... ram
isn't your problem. You might want to post a jpeg of your parts (although
I'll never see it because my web interface doesn't work right) so people can
see the type of assembly. 50 complex parts (fillets, draft, arrays) can
bring IV to a standstill just as easily as 10,000 simple ones.

You might want to post the results of the hardware diagnostics screen too.

[Mike123]

There is a confidentiality issue with the data until the product is launched in 5-6 weeks time. However, I am interested in getting a second opinion and do appreciate the interest yourself and everyone else has taken. I guess either there is a problem with this particular model or my PC or the model is just too complex for the hardware. Although it has about 130 parts they vary in complexity from simple screws to a couple of complex castings made up of 300+ elements.
I will change the model to remove the confidential elements and see if this has the same problem and if so I can let you have that to look at. Sorry for the cloak and dagger stuff but it is quite literally more than my jobs worth to let this data leave our secure server at the moment. Hope you understand. Total size of data to send would be about 75MB.