SOLIDWORKS Performance Evaluation - Assemblies
SOLIDWORKS Performance Evaluation tool can generate a report that examines an assembly and generates a report which can be used to determine which elements may be changed to improve the assembly’s performance.
General Notes to Consider
Although the conditions identified by Performance Evaluation can degrade assembly performance, they are not errors. Weigh the Performance Evaluation recommendations against your design intent. In some cases, implementing the recommendation can improve assembly performance, but might compromise your design intent.
If the model has not been rebuilt in the current version of SOLIDWORKS, there is no rebuild data available, so not all the tests can be performed. Rebuild the model prior to accessing Performance Evaluation.
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Assembly Performance Evaluation
In an Assembly file, click Performance Evaluation from the Evaluate tab of the CommandManager or from Tools > Evaluate > Performance Evaluation. SOLIDWORKS will rebuild the file and then display a performance report.
The Performance Evaluation dialog displays organized into the following topics.
Open Performance
- Provides information related to opening an assembly.
Display Performance
- Reports on the number of graphics triangles, excessive image quality, slow display speed, and components that contain a high number of face level appearances.
Rebuild Performance
- Rebuild Performance provides information about rebuilding an assembly.
Settings Performance
- Indicates if the Verification on rebuild option is enabled and if Large Assembly Settings is enabled.
Statistics
- Reports statistics about the parts, subassemblies, components, and assembly
The following icons are used to indicate the status of each diagnostic.
Open Performance
Displays information on open times for the parts of the assembly, files that are saved in a previous version of SOLIDWORKS that should be updated to the most recent release, and any files that were modified during the open, such as a reference from the assembly requiring updating a hole position defined in-context to another file.
Things to consider which may improve performance at this topic:
Review the file Open Time and use Performance Evaluation at the part level to determine if improvement can be made.
Previous Version References, consider upgrading files to the same SOLIDWORKS version you are running.
Modify On Open, review these files to determine why the files require modification on open, and if those modifications are necessary or if they can be simplified. If there are assembly level features that are adding in-context features, then yes, those features are required and files should update on open. Often, performance losses come from unintentional design intent across parts in an assembly.
Display Performance
Display Performance displays the number of graphics triangles per file multiplied by the number of instances for the total number of triangles contributing to the overall graphical display. You will also see if there are parts that have the Image Quality set too high.
Generally, files with 500,000 or more graphics triangles should be reviewed to decrease their graphical display performance. The image quality on parts can be adjusted easily within the part by going to Tools > Options > Document Properties > Image Quality and moving the slider bars down.
The Display Performance section also helps identify parts that are likely to be complex designs that may benefit from some simplification methods at the top-assembly through the use of tools like Defeature.
Rebuild Performance
The most recent rebuild diagnostic data is displayed.
Circular References reports circular references between parts in an assembly where the parts have external references to other parts in the same assembly.
Mates checks the number of mates that are evaluated when the assembly rebuilds and the amount of time taken to evaluate those mates. Certain mating conditions can result in slower rebuild times. If mates rebuild slowly, Performance Evaluation reports any mates that reference Assembly Features or Patterned Components. Tip, in the Mates dialog box, you can select a mate under Name to highlight the mate in the graphics area.
Assembly Rebuild Report displays the last assembly rebuild and shows the time taken to rebuild for significant components and features. You can expand or collapse nodes in the report. Components that are rebuilt more than one time appear in red. Components that take 10 milliseconds or less to rebuild are omitted from the list.
In-Context Part Performance (not shown in the example image) Reports when in-context relationships involving relatively large parts contribute a significant percentage to the assembly rebuild time. When an assembly is rebuilt, all in-context relationships established at the top level of the assembly are re-evaluated. First, the location of the driving component is determined by evaluating its mates and sometimes rebuilding the driving component. Then, the driven component is rebuilt. If the driven component is a complex part with many features, rebuilding the component can take a significant amount of time.
- If you make changes that require the driven component to be resolved, then increased rebuild time is unavoidable.
- If you work on components that are not related to the driven component, you can improve the rebuild performance of the assembly by suppressing the driven component.
In the In-Context Part Performance dialog box, you can select one or more components in the list to highlight in the graphics area, or click Isolate Components to display only the selected components in the graphics area. Click Exit Isolate (Isolate pop-up toolbar) to return to the list.
Settings Performance
Settings Performance indicates if the Verification on rebuild option is enabled and if Large Assembly Settings is enabled. See below for additional information for each topic.
The Verification on rebuild option performs a thorough evaluation of the model during rebuild that can slow rebuild performance.
- When this option is off, the software checks every new or changed feature against any adjacent faces and edges. For most situations, this default level of error checking is adequate, and results in faster rebuilding of the model.
- When this option is on, the software checks every new or changed feature against all existing faces and edges, not just adjacent ones. This checking has a negative effect on performance. Rebuilding the model is considerably slower and more CPU-intensive.
To turn off Verification on rebuild select Tools > Options > System Options tab, select Performance. Clear Verification on rebuild.
Large Assembly Settings reports the number of resolved components, the large assembly threshold, and if Large Assembly Settings is enabled.
To enable Large Assembly Settings, select Tools > Large Assembly Settings.
Large Assembly Settings is a collection of system settings that improves the performance of assemblies. You can enable Large Assembly Settings at any time, or you can set a threshold for the number of components and have Large Assembly Settings enabled automatically when that threshold is reached.
Lightweight components have only a subset of their model data loaded into memory. The remaining model data loads on an as-needed basis. Assemblies with lightweight components rebuild faster because less data is evaluated. You can manually set single components, subassemblies, or entire assemblies to lightweight mode; or load components lightweight when the large assembly threshold is reached.
Statistics
Performance Evaluation reports statistics about the parts, subassemblies, components, and assembly.
- Total number of components
- Number of unique parts and part documents
- Number of unique subassemblies and subassembly documents
- Maximum depth of the assembly hierarchy (for nested subassemblies)
- Number of top-level components
- Number of resolved, lightweight, and suppressed components
- Number of top-level mates
- Number of bodies
This information is critical to help understand how to improve overall open and performance of your assembly models. The greater the complexity of any top-level assembly, the longer it will take to open the file and the slower it will be to work within the design. To improve overall performance, it’s necessary to try and reduce the number of mates by various strategies like creating sub-assemblies or using lock-rotation for hardware instead of adding an extra mate or using assembly patterns.
The takeaway of the information outlined in the guide is to provide a better understanding of what affects assembly performance, specifically if you’re working on a complex design with many references from one file to another. Visualizing the various topics above may provide you with the necessary information to decrease file open and performance times.
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