STEP files not saving / slow to save

[steve_lindley]

Hi,

I work in a team of four designers, all using Inventor Pro 2024. We keep up to date with all releases of Inventor and for the last couple of years, we've all really struggled with both importing and saving STEP files of assemblies.

I'll focus on saving for this post, but it would be interesting to hear if other users are also experiencing problems with STEP files generally.

It doesn't seem to be an issue with saving part files, which we do regularly for our sheet metal suppliers.

Most of our customers and suppliers are still only able to open 203 configuration, so that's what we default to, but in all honesty, the software seems to struggle no matter what configuration we choose. I don't know of a way to tell what configuration it has been sent in, without asking the sender.

It doesn't seem to make any difference if we're saving across the network or locally to the PC.

What usually happens is that after the dialogue box for file location and name has closed, we get a blue spinning wheel cursor showing that save is in progress, and a file will appear in the chosen location, but file size is usually relatively small. To give some example, a STEP file that eventually managed to save successfully was almost 20Mb, but in the failed attempts with the same file, it originally saved at only 2Mb. Inventor however stays stuck with the 'spinning wheel of doom' and cannot be used without crashing it out.

During this time, in the process tab of the task manager, everything is low (power usage, disk, CPU, etc). I try not to use any other software during that time, but if I have to look on File Explorer, it's slow to load up. 

At various times, all of us in the office have tried saving different files overnight, but quite often we still come in in the morning to a spinning wheel. 

The 20Mb file mentioned before took about five attempts and over an hour to get a result. The time it was successful took about 10 minutes to save, but previous failed attempts were much longer than this, so it suggests to me that the process is getting stuck somewhere. I've got four of these to do today. It's a massive amount of time that's not productive. There's only so many emails to answer whilst we wait!

Our PC's are all the same spec:

Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-10900F CPU @ 2.80GHz 2.81 GHz

64.0GB RAM

64-bit OS Windows 10 Pro

NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000 Graphics card

Can anyone offer suggestions on how to improve this or is it just something to put up with?

Many thanks

Steve

[JDMather]

Are you using Vault or are you using Projects (*.ipj)?

Are you using customized Templates?

My first thought is the path to your templates - although that would be issue in opening, not saving. Can you Attach an example assembly?

[steve_lindley]

Thanks for replying. In answer to your questions:

We're not using Vault unfortunately.

We use one common project file and yes we use customized templates.

Interesting suggestion about the location of our templates. I've often wondered if we're following best practise here.

We have one drive and one folder on our network for all CAD data and our one ipj is saved at this level:

V:\3D Data

Our templates are saved on this path:

V:\3D Data\Inventor templates

The files I'm working on today are under an NDA, so I can't attach one of them. As a guide, they're all about 500KB in size. If you have an assembly file of similar size, how long does it take you to save as a STEP file?

[JDMather]

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@steve_lindley wrote:

We use one common project file and yes we use customized templates.

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@steve_lindley 

Can you Attach your *.ipj file here?

[steve_lindley]

I'm happy to share, but I'm not sure how! 

[steve_lindley]

[Frederick_Law]

Since all your files are on network, saving and opening STEP is done across network.

Try save to STEP locally with a local file.

A STEP with 9 cabinet I'm working on:

33MB saved in 10 second.

All STEP files are text.

Open them in text editor and you can see if it's 203, 214 or 242:

[steve_lindley]

@Frederick_Law 

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@Frederick_Law wrote:

Since all your files are on network, saving and opening STEP is done across network.

Try save to STEP locally with a local file.

Thanks for your suggestions. I tried saving to my desktop this morning on one of the assemblies. It made no difference. Do you think it would make any difference if I did a pack and go on the assembly to bring the .iam locally and then save locally as a STEP?

Your 10 second save is the sort of time we used to get. 

Good to know about checking the text for the version. 👍

[Frederick_Law]

I'll try a local convert to see if there is different.

That will show if network is a problem.

Another thing is anti-virus.  Make sure it's not scanning IV files.

[steve_lindley]

@Frederick_Law 

Funny you should mention the antivirus. I suspected this a while back and contacted the IT company we use. This is what they said:

"This is a new one – we don’t have anyone else using Inventor, but we do cover a few offices using AutoCAD LT and they haven’t had any problems of this nature. As with most offices, we don’t allow get the Active Protection to scan every single file because your systems would grind to a total halt. We use a profile called “high risk extensions only” which means that it only scans files which have been known to cause damage (html files, executables, bat, inf etc). The inventor files are not included on that list.

However, that doesn’t mean it isn’t the AV that’s causing the problem as I’ve seen a lot of strange things happen with anti-virus software over the years. The best way to rule it out will be to arrange for a PC in your office to have the AV removed and then see whether it rectifies the problem or not."

Unfortunately, my boss dismissed the suggestion... perhaps I should push for a test next time he's cursing the STEP file save time.

[Frederick_Law]

Some AV allow "turn off for 1 hour" so user can test problem.

[johnsonshiue]

Hi Steve,

The behavior does not sound right to me. It should just work. If possible, please send me the STEP files directly johnson.shiue@autodesk.com. I would like to understand the behavior better.

In the meantime, you may try enabling an environment variable (Control Panel -> System -> Advanced System Settings -> Environment Variable -> create "DYNAMIC_LOAD_APPLETS" and set it to 0). This variable will force Inventor to load all dlls on startup. Some users confirmed that the environment variable does help resolve some mysterious translation failures.

Many thanks!