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Alibre 2012 randomly slows to a crawl

mmaze

Member
Alibre 2012 runs fine on my laptop at work, but when I use it on my home computer it will randomly slow to a crawl until I restart the program. Recently it seemed to be happening right after I would save or export files to a different format, but I don't know if this has anything to do with the problem. My computer hardware is more than capable and when it is running fine it is 10 times quicker than my work laptop. I have listed my system specs below. Any help or suggestions are greatly appreciated!

CPU TYPE: Intel® Core™2 Quad CPU Q6700 Overclocked @ 3.4GHz
SYSTEM MEMORY: 7.75 GB
VIDEO CARD MODEL: NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250
VIDEO CARD MEMORY: 1 GB
VIDEO CARD DRIVER: nvd3dum.dll
HARD DRIVE: 1tb WD Caviar Black
SSD: 60gb OCZ Agility 3
 

bigseb

Alibre Super User
I know this may be pointing out very obvious but what, if any, other processes are running at the same time. Possibly a scheduled defrag? Virus scan? It may well be something like this seeing as how it only happens on one PC.

Plus saving something to different format, especially of its huge will slow down your system. I have had that too with some of the larger mould assemblies I do, often resulting in my computer "not responding". These are pretty big assemblies, 500 plus parts. I just let it get on with it. Fellow designers that use other softwares have the same issues when saving/opening large files, especially in non-native formats so I've never considered it to be Alibre specific.
 

mmaze

Member
Thanks for your response. Task manager was this first thing I checked and I didn't notice anything out of the ordinary. Alibre.exe was using the most virtual memory but that is normal.

The slow down is not actually during the saving or exporting. I understand and have seen what you are saying about the large assemblies and it makes sense that the program slows during saves / exports of large assemblies like that, but this assembly is only 10 simple pieces. The slow down is actually while trying to move, rotate, and manipulate the part in the program though, not really during the save. All the movement and everything you do becomes choppy, has a really bad delay, and becomes very difficult to work with. After I close Alibre and restart it everything is fine for a while, but it randomly gets bogged down.
 

mmaze

Member
I was able to dig a little deeper into your suggestion that another service may be running in the backround hogging ram. For some reason this program did not show up in the "Task Manager" but when I looked at the performance tab it said that my system was using 4.5 gb of ram when the only programs open were Alibre and my browser. When I went into "Performance Monitor" on the memory tab and sorted by "Private" memory the program wmpnetwk.exe was using over 2.5gb of memory. This apparently is a program that allows windows media player to share media. I don't use it and have shut the service off. This took me from 4.5gb of ram used to under 2gb used while Alibre is open. Now all I can do is wait and see if I experience any more slow downs. Thanks again for your input!
 

bigseb

Alibre Super User
Yeah, another place to check is msconfig. Check the services and startup tabs to get a better picture of all the applications that start when you boot.
 
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