Clearing Inventors cached data?

[Neil_Cross]

I'm probably the only person in the world who wants to know this, but I'll not bore you with the reasons!

When you open a large assembly (express or full mode), it takes say 1 minute to open.

If you close Inventor, re-open, and then open the same large assembly again, it opens in half the time.

I assume this is because Inventor caches some of that previous assembly in RAM for quicker opening, which is all dumped on a reboot.

How do I manually flush all that stuff without rebooting? 

I've tried restarting all Autodesk services, Superfetch, I have no idea where all this stuff is held.

[Frederick_Law · Accepted solution]

Once you closed Inventor, it doesn't cache anything.

What you see is Windows caching recently opened files.

[Neil_Cross]

Interesting, I remember Inventor used to have a setting in the File tab on application options for caching recently opened assemblies - that's gone now so I figured they'd baked it into the product.

So is there a way to flush the files out from Windows that you know of?

I'm benchmarking the opening times for assemblies and this pretty much screws everything up!

[Frederick_Law]

Inventor does cache opened files, only while Inventor is running.  Once you close it, cache is gone.

Try this to clear Windows memory:

https://www.geckoandfly.com/9298/flush-and-free-up-windows-7-memory-cache/

Another way is to make a zip file bigger than your computer's memory.

[johnsonshiue]

Hi Niel,

Based on internal testing, the option can interfere with how assembly Express mode works. Also in some cases (depending available RAM), the option can lead to usage of swap space unnecessarily. The option has been removed from 2019.

Many thanks!

[Scott_Parker · Accepted solution]

It could be just the loading of the DLLs used by the executable that is faster.  If there is enough memory, Windows will cache DLLs that have been previously loaded.  This will make the second time a executable is started much faster.

Scott

[Neil_Cross]

Yea I guess so, ok thanks to everyone who chipped in there.

It's just a menace because when you're timing how long it takes for a workstation to open an assembly - it totally skews the results from one test to the next if some stuff is already preloaded.  Never mind, I can deal with it as long as I know.

Cheers folks.

[Neil_Cross]

@Scott_Parker @johnsonshiue I just remembered what triggered me to think it was Inventor holding onto the files... if you close Inventor down completely, you're not able to delete the last folder you opened a file from in Inventor.

It's been 10 minutes since I closed Inventor but I still can't delete this folder until I reboot.  How can we blame Windows for this when this doesn't happen for any other application?