Hardware Sweetspot - New Alibre

[PaulProe]

As my project grows in size, I am finding more and more issues with speed of the system - seems it is taking a lot of time "thinking' before the display refreshes/regenerates.

I am currently running on a Desktop, Intel Core i5-6600 running at 3.50 Ghz, 8 Gb Memory, GeForce 1060 w/6Gb, Windows10 Pro, no other processes running in the background.

I would have thought this would have more than enough HP to redraw very quickly. The largest file I'm working on is about 4Mb

Can anyone comment - are my issues to little memory and if so, what is the sweetspot or maybe other issues

Thanks

Paul

 

[bigseb]

... are my issues to little memory...

Not for a 4Mb file.

Actually your system is not bad and I don't see any reason to upgrade.

Its likely that your save location could be the cause. Are you saving to a separate server? If so possibly the connection between your PC and service is too slow.

 

[RocketNut]

I have an extreme large model that takes almost 3 mins to load ( that is if it does not throw an API error). Basically there is 12 large sub-assemblies and they have more sub-assemblies. The model eats up to 4.5G of memory.

 

[simonb65]

I have an extreme large model that takes almost 3 mins to load ( that is if it does not throw an API error).

There is definitely something very inefficient about the way Alibre loads models or loads parts into assemblies.

I have a bespoke application that creates assemblies by adding existing parts at specific xyz locations and rotating them as they are loaded in using the API. The parts I add are literally a handful of simple primitive shapes (electronic components). It seems like Alibre is doing a lot of processing each time the model changes (i.e. new part added), rather than waiting until all parts are added, then doing the processing once! You have a similar process when writing applications that do windows drawing. There you have a command to suspend screen redrawing until you've drawn all your items, then you invalidate the screen area and the window is refreshed once.

@Max, maybe this Alibre open/import/add process is something that you can confirm? Is there something available in the API that can suppress the data from being processed every single iteration of change? Is this the reason why Alibre is very slow compared to MOI when importing STP files? Something worth looking at as part files and models are only getting bigger and the topic of open/import speed is coming up more often these days!

 

[PaulProe]

Studying my performance logs, it looks like Alibre, with the drawing in question open, is using about 4.5 Gb of the 8G memory. I am seeing about 50% processor activity. Tried the same thing (same drawing) on my laptop that is an i7 w/16G and I am seeing 7.5G and the same cpu usage.

Does the program allocate a percentage of available memory and then use it? Maybe slowing down as it nears the limits of its allocation? Seems strange doing the same thing would engage different amounts of memory. Can anyone on the Alibre staff comment about suggested memory sizes

I am doing this on a laptop or on a desktop and not having to connect to a server so that shouldn't affect speed of calculation. There's got to be a way to speed all this up. Looking at the processes on the GPU, it's loafing along at 2% so that's not the bottleneck.

? ? ?

 

[JST]

I use Alibre on a 2.5 GHz 2 processor system with 4 Gb memory, and it seems plenty fast (Dell M6300, Win 7).

What the machine really affects is Keyshot, because of only having 2 processors. Alibre is not slow. You may have another issue.

possibly having one processor (I think you said that) is having an effect. While alibre only uses one, if ther is only one, that one has to do all the other system tasks as well as run Alibre

I looked, and with Alibre open, on my system, it takes up 2.08 Gb. With a fairly large file open it goes up to 2.36 Gb, and with Firefox open as well, it is 2.85 Gb. With only task manager open the usage is 1.31 Gb.

 

[Kim]

As my project grows in size, I am finding more and more issues with speed of the system - seems it is taking a lot of time "thinking' before the display refreshes/regenerates.

I am currently running on a Desktop, Intel Core i5-6600 running at 3.50 Ghz, 8 Gb Memory, GeForce 1060 w/6Gb, Windows10 Pro, no other processes running in the background.

I would have thought this would have more than enough HP to redraw very quickly. The largest file I'm working on is about 4Mb

Can anyone comment - are my issues to little memory and if so, what is the sweetspot or maybe other issues

Thanks

Paul

One thing to check is if your mainboard has a built in graphics card that is still enabled (quite often using shared main RAM). Most mainboards that have built in graphics card have an option to disable them (either BIOs or jumpers on the MB itself).

I have come across this situation in the past (slow loading) and the culprit was a conflict with the graphics cards.