Are you frustrated with Large Assembly/Drawing Performance ?

[ChrisMitchell01]

Do you find yourself waiting in frustration when working with large assemblies or their drawings in Inventor? The Inventor team would appreciate your help in identifying your problems. Please complete our large assembly performance survey.

Many Thanks,
Chris

[Jef_E]

Glad to see there is some initiative on this matter. Hope you get alot of response.

[mpatchus]

Definitely need some improvements for large assemblies.

Our average project is generally in the neighborhood of 100,000 instances of 1,000+ parts.

Some of our larger projects have hit 300,000 instances.

Work comes to a crawl when we go over 100,000 usually.

[cbenner]

Survey done.  Not doing anything as big as what @mpatchus mentioned, and my responsivness in large assemblies is not good at all.  Mostly Vault Content.  Making strides to improve our Vault server and will be upgrading workstations this year, but anything ADSK can do on thier end would be fantastic.

[smokes2998]

Dealing with assemblies this big 

with out have to do all the things in this guide

http://beinginventive.typepad.com/files/inventor-deep-dive---large-assembly-instructions.pdf

would be a great time saver.

[LT.Rusty]

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@cbenner wrote:

Survey done.  Not doing anything as big as what @mpatchus mentioned, and my responsivness in large assemblies is not good at all.  Mostly Vault Content.  Making strides to improve our Vault server and will be upgrading workstations this year, but anything ADSK can do on thier end would be fantastic.

---

Chris, there's a very, very simple way to improve your performance with Vault content: move it to your local hard drive, uninstall Vault, and pretend like it never existed at all. 😄

(Edit to add: my survey response is done as well.  No huge issues with the assemblies, but I've had some frustrations in the drawing side of things with truly, ridiculously detailed single parts that would take an hour to update the drawing.)

[Anonymous]

I have a configurator of a greengouse that currently gets to about 750,000 parts, and will top 1,000,000 when completed. I am VERY interested in this. I'll take the survey

Thanks Chris,

Mark

[Anonymous]

I was working w/ Assy's of 30-40k parts.  However I was running code to manipulate the files which would wind up taking months of run time to navigate through the parts.  I mean I hit run on the API and would need to wait a month for it to finish running.  This before really doing some fenagling to the code. W/ a pretty good graphics card and computer stats I'd have lots of trouble just opening the file let alone running the api. 

However I've seen amazing improvement after switching to an SSD.  Holy, Frijole what a difference an SSD makes.  If you deal w/ huge ASSY's start w/ an SSD.  If it still makes your comp choke then you've got one big Assy. 

[WHolzwarth]

Hi Chris,

I'm far away from 100000 parts, but my troubles begin already with driving constraints of about 2000 instances of 300 individual parts.

Files can be downloaded here:

https://grabcad.com/library/lego-technic-williams-f1-team-racer-8461-1

Walter

[-ianf-]

In this day and age what with 16 core xeon processors Autodesk need to pool resources into completely rewriting the software to utilise the hardware available. I have used machines with top spec SSD's and huge amounts of RAM however the bottle neck always comes down to the processor.  Until the software can fully utilise what todays processors can do then Inventor will never zip along and we will continue to watch the windows blue circle spin and spin.

[kennyjohnson1]

Survey Taken.

From the questions I am excited to see that Autodesk is aware of the situation(s) at the very least. I look forward to seeing what the response to these issues becomes.

Kenny

Inventor Professional 2016 (Build 210, SP1)

Vault Professional 2016 (Build 21.0.59.0)

AutoCAD Mechanical 2016 (1.104.0.0 SP1, M.107.0.0 SP1)

3ds Max 2016 (18.0 SP3)

Windows 7 Enterprise SP1 64-bit Intel Xeon E5 v3 @ 3.10GHz

128 GB Ram NVIDIA Quadro M6000 (12 GB GDDR5)

500GB SSD

3dconnexion SpaceNavigator & CadMouse

[Anonymous]

yes my assembly is not showing up in the idw but is showing on the browser.  They were there and now not working

[kennyjohnson1]

NadineCat,

A few things to try: 

Is it possible you have the views at a scale that is hard to see?  Zoom out and ensure the drawings are not large/ click on the view bounding boxes and ensure the scale isn't small.  Can you see the dotted view ports around where the views would have been?  In the browser is there a lightning bolt next to the view - can you refresh the view?

Inventor will open a file even if the file associated is lost / broken.  It is possible your assembly file/part files are not in the project location, so it cannot find them.  They would have appeared when you first placed them, but then be lost later.  In the browser, at the top switch from Model to Vault, and see if any of the parts have red arrows circling or ! symbols.  They may need to be relocated or refreshed.

In the browser; are the parts/assemblies bold or greyed out?  Is it possible the visibilty is off?  Go to the view port, right click and select Edit. Check the View Representation and try switching to default or master.

Are the parts crossed out / lined out in the browser?  It is possible they are suppressed.  Go to the top of the browser and choose Level of Detail, Master.

Close the drawing, and in a blank screen (no part, assembly or idw) choose in the ribbon "Project".  Under the option for Files, click add, and browse to the part / assemblie files.  Select that folder.  Hit save.  Try opening the idw again.

I hope this helps.  If any of the above did help, please select "Save as Solution".  Kudos are nice, too. 

-Kenny

[stas87]

I'm frustrated with the all Inventor 2017. I get very uncomfortable even when working with parts with only 15+ features in it, however i have i7-6700, GTX970m,16gb RAM and pci-e SSD. I have slow-downs when zooming, rotating and even i need to wait 2-3 sec to create a new feature, while i did not have any uncomfortables in inv2016. The content center and threads is a separate topic... 15-20 sec to open thread or bolt connection dialogues... and, yes, i have only one standard checked (GOST)! Guys you really need to provide patched more often to fight back those Solidworks bastards

[Anonymous]

Inventor now only works with singlecore-performance as fast as possible. But this hardware-performance won't be growing in the future in recent dimension. The only solution for very complex datasets will be multithreading or gpu-computing. Maybe hard to do, but there's no alternative.

Even if money for hardware is no topic, you have no chance to get massive more performance than a 6700k @overclocking.

[ToddPig]

After reading the first post, I was thinking maybe this is why Inventor 2017 is so much slower than 2015, because I have mostly been working on assemblies since the upgrade, then I compared my number of components to the users replying to this post and realized I was off by a factor of 100, in the wrong direction. My assemblies are super slow (I read the discussion forum while waiting), and I have less then 50 components.

[Barry1Lau]

I don't know if I have really large assemblies (200 to 300 parts), but there have been some issues with variable constraints locking up within the assemblies.  Sometimes it takes me hours to figure out which one is causing the problem.  It helps a little if I excercise all the constraints after adding a new one before setting another.

[Tigerpirro]

The survey is inactive but I can tell you about my experience with large assemblies. 

I recently did a job where the assembly was basically the entirety of a steel, an entire factory. Since we were a couple of companies working with the assembly many of the beams, floors, walls, machines and stuff were (by the less experienced users) added in multiple assemblies. sSo clones of the same part were common.

My computer was a 2-3 year old (stationary) workstation which did really well in all benchmark tests. SSD, 64 Gb ram etc. Opening the main assembly took about 4 hours and orbiting was done at 0,1 - 0,15 Hz (FPS). This was a bit frustrating, especially since it was my job to make some preliminary drawings to show where different areas of responsibility started/ended.

Now, Inventor could have been better at handling large assemblies but a lot of the frustration came from me thinking (and stupidly not CHECKING) that I had a graphics card with more memory than I though. I had 1Gb where i thought I had at least 2 or 3.

I have now switched to a new laptop workstation with a 4Gb card and it takes about 5 minutes to open the same assembly.

So, if you are having problems with large assemblies being slow, I would recommend going for a graphics card with a big memory. Not necessarily a fast card (couldn't hurt if you have the budget), but a lot of memory.

I hope this helps!

Have a nice day.

[holzmand16]

Unfortunately by the time I saw this survey it had been closed.  We do assemblies from 10,000 to 45,000 parts, with 1000-3000 unique parts.  I had hoped express mode would have helped this, but unfortunately we have had issues with assemblies not being shown correctly until fully loaded.  On larger assemblies it may take 10-15 minutes for a change to take affect.  We looked at different workflows with are VAR, but their workflow suggestions do not work well with how we physically build the product.  We have tried using shrinkwraps but it occasionally removes surfaces that represent whole parts(not to be confused with removing holes).  We had hoped when we went from 2012 to 2016 along with getting new hardware that we would have seen a performance increase, but unfortunately we have not. 

Doug

Inventor Pro 2016 SP2

HP Z840

32 GB Ram

Zeon 3.5 GHZ

Quadro K2200

[ChrisMitchell01]

Doug et al,

At this stage, probably the best way to provide us feedback about large assembly performance is to participate in the Inventor Alpha/Beta program.

If you don't already have access then you can apply using this link: https://bit.ly/InventorBeta

Based on the feedback from that (now expired) survey as well as numerous other research efforts, we've been working on many different projects to improve Inventor performance.

We're also happy to investigate specific Inventor dataset issues as part of the Alpha/beta testing when needed.

Thanks,

Chris