RobCAD Performance

[Luciano]

Hello guys!
I have a question and maybe it could be interesting for a lot of users...

Sometimes we have to make kinematics in huge components and some customers don't accept "Super-components".
There are fixtures with more than 50 joints and thousands of entities.
This is a big problem to open the model, taking too much time and sometimes RobCAD crashes due to low virtual memory and we lost all the job.

Do you know if there is any way to avoid this problem?
How do you usually work when you have to "modeling" a big component?

Thanks for any help!  

[simspec]

standard method is supercomponents.

is it a technical reason or just the customers whim that they dont accept supercomponents?

are there problems with the models (lots of little facets (triangles) instead of proper surfaces / solids)?  -these dramatically increase the size of the component.

what version of robcad are you using and on what platform (unix or windows   (xp, vista, 7,     32bit or 64bit)?

[Luciano]

Yes, you're correct. Usually the customers require all fixtures as supercomponents.
But I don't know why, some of them simply don't accept.

Anyway, my PC is a Dell Precision T7400 and the configuration is:
Windows XP Professional 64-bit OS, Intel Xeon 2GHz, 4Gb RAM, NVIDIA Quadro FX 3700.
It's a good PC I guess, isn't it?

[simspec]

sounds ok, what is the graphics card ram?

what version of robcad are you using?
what version of exceed are you using?
what do you have your virtual memory set to?

[Luciano]

My graphic card is NVIDIA Quadro FX 3700 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 SLI.

My virtual memory is set to 4093Mb (is it good?).
The RobCAD Version is 9.0 and the Exceed is for Win32, Version 13.0.11.489.

Does it have an Exceed version for Win64?
Do you think this could be a problem?

[simspec]

Dedicated graphics memory or does it borrow from the computers ram?
normally set virtual ram to 1.5x actual ram so if you have 4GB of actual ram set virtual ram to 6GB, also set the initial size and maximum size of the virtual ram to the same value (this decrease wasted time whilst windows allocates more virtual ram on the fly, it also means you should get a continuous piece of the harddrive for virtual ram which inreases speed- if you do it soon after installing windows)

robcad runs on exceed, so if you have a 64bit computer and a 32bit version of exceed robcad cant take full advantage.

if you can get a 64bit version of exceed it should run a bit quicker.

[simspec]

forgot to mention defrag your hardrive!

also if you have more than one physical harddrive on your computer (not partition drive Letters, 2 harddrives) put the virtual ram on the hardrive that does not contain your software as this is quicker