performance evaluation tool

[mp3-250]

SW2022 SP5

It is been years we are struggling with drawing performance issues.
Sometimes it is even a single body sheet metal part that is just unbearable to work with, plus PDM overhead.

I am looking at this problem with a wide approach and an open mind, but SW tools that should be there to help us are rather... ehm "suboptimal"...

Running the performance evaluation tool should give us a lot of useful information, but I am struggling making sense of some of them.
I will try making a smaller part and debug everything, but some detailed documentation woul help a lot.

Things are quite funny actually.
Welcome to the crazy world of evaluate-something-o-matic.

Here a mutibody part drawing spanning 4 sheets. no configurations, no view states.

1. Sketch relations:
evaluation tells me that there are 5,000+ sketch relations in the drawing I am analyzing, but is it in the 3D model? in 2D drawing sheets? both? And where are them inside the drawing?
Is there a way to show sketch relations per view or globally inside a sheet? AFAIK no.
I tried to delete all the relations in our drawing block and frame... run evaluation tool again: sketch relations went up to 11,000+ in the evaluation tool!!
What does it mean? unreliable garbage? random numbers?

2. cosmetic threats
I read on the KB that those could be heavy and we use a lot of them.
evaluation gave me 5000+ threads.
there is no way we have that much in that 3D model, so it must related with views: I have yet to properly count them but, a roughly estimate is 20 views (incl. ldetails that shows like 1 single hole) x 200 threads.
So I suppressed ALL cosmetic threads in the 3D, regenerate the whole thing, and running valuation again: still around 800 threads... where are those left??
So I made a macro to switch every drawing view from high quality threads to draft quality threads: they went down to ZERO.
Nice.
BTW suppressing cosmetic threads in 3D improved view regeneration time according to the performance evaluation tool (like about 10-20%)

I made a simple test model from scratch. A square plate with a hole in the middle. drawing with front view only; evaluation tool tells me 1 thread. ok
front view + side view (hole hidden)
according to evaluation tool 2 threads. somehow it still makes sense.
where those 800 threads come from? my educated guess looking at the drawing is that they were previously there and got deleted during the design phase so dangling threads inside the 2d drawings? Still much to investigate. (but why I need to investigate something that should be in the help file...)

Another question on cosmetic threads:
according to KB upgrading threads should improve performance... Since the drawing I was analyzing is based on newest template and threads are already upgraded by default, I tried it on older drawing of a different model and according to evaluation tool the regeneration time increased slowing down the drawing?? uh

3. One big slowdown was caused by projected view that had some body hidden in the view property (they were in the background of the view making the foreground a bit difficult to understand)
Making those bodies visible again improved performance and many slowdowns disappeared.
I made a display state instead of hiding the bodies. opening the drawing was quite slow and there was no apparent improvement. must investigate more, but like sections are hidden assembly configurations, hiding bodies inside a view could be a hidden display state so no much gain... I guess.


---UPDATES HERE---

[AlexLachance]

Let's start from the beginning. Is it everything that seems 'heavy' or only the drawing side?

If you could provide some screenshot of the performance evaluation screen, perhaps I could be of help. I'm generally the one that troubleshoots our stuff around here when we're trying to get it to be lighter.

Do you use envelopes?

Keep views in high quality, draft quality is a source of problems and only make things 'heavier' even though it is the opposite that is intended.

[mp3-250]

@AlexLachance

Thank you for the reply. This site is blocked by our network so it is difficult to share something here and I usually have to post from my phone.

This drawing is our "typical" scenario:

- no envelopes this time (but we use them in assemblies)

- a multibody part file with 30-40 cut list item and one surface body as desgin base, a single configuration

- 3D is not slow, 2D is slow (regeneration, opening, view generation, general slow down during normal operations※)

- our views are always high quality by default (I never saw one of our drawing view set as draft... unfortunately)

- threads are also in high quality

- 4 sheets

※ this particular slow down was tracked down to a single view with some bodies hidden in view -> property. vizualizing all bodies back solved that slowdown
with heavy drawings usually we hide all the unused views while working or switch them in shaded mode

[AlexLachance]

@AlexLachance

Thank you for the reply. This site is blocked by our network so it is difficult to share something here and I usually have to post from my phone.

This drawing is our "typical" scenario:

- no envelopes this time (but we use them in assemblies)

- a multibody part file with 30-40 cut list item and one surface body as desgin base, a single configuration

- 3D is not slow, 2D is slow (regeneration, opening, view generation, general slow down during normal operations※)

- our views are always high quality by default (I never saw one of our drawing view set as draft... unfortunately)

- threads are also in high quality

- 4 sheets

※ this particular slow down was tracked down to a single view with some bodies hidden in view -> property. vizualizing all bodies back solved that slowdown
with heavy drawings usually we hide all the unused views while working or switch them in shaded mode

Have you looked inside the drawing for empty view shells? There's a bug that a lot of users get, including me, which creates a view shell for every "view" from the view palette in your drawing. These are drawing bound, not sheet-bound, so deleting them on one sheet deletes them everywhere. Sometimes you can get them to show without seeing them, so to see them you need to create a page. If you delete one view, they generally disappear and you need to redo the procedure to have them show again so I generally memorize their location and select them all at once and then delete them.

Section views have surfacic bodies shown by default. For some reason, it slows down view generation even if there aren't any surfacic bodies, so uncheck this in every section views.

Do you have a "master view"? What I call a master view is a Model view that has projected views from it. If so, try having as much of your view settings be set to "Use parent style". Having it unchecked creates an additional regeneration, kinda.

If you have 3D views, those get set to draft quality by default, so set these to high. Also, some views tend to turn to draft quality depending on a few things, so you might just wanna look around to see if you don't have views that toggled the setting by themselves

And well, the more pages and views, the longer it gets to save/open/regenerate. Think of it as a tree. Each view is a branch. If you create each view individually, then all the branches are at the base and your tree is already "maxed out". If you create a model view and then project from this view, the projected views are branches connected to the branch of the model view. Each setting that does not "follow" the parent's style is an additional branch.

Hope this helps

[mp3-250]

Thank you very much.

this is the kind of technical insight I would like to hear from my VAR.
I have disabled view palette in our standard settings, but there are probably a lot of data derived from old files around.

It is going to take sone time, but I will check all your suggestions.

Again thank you for your time an advices!

[AlexLachance]

Thank you very much.

this is the kind of technical insight I would like to hear from my VAR.
I have disabled view palette in our standard settings, but there are probably a lot of data derived from old files around.

It is going to take sone time, but I will check all your suggestions.

Again thank you for your time an advices!

Eager to hear if you'll have a decent improvement. You could also look your document image quality to see if it could be tweaked down a bit.

[AlexLachance]

Oh, two other things to add:

Make sure your display states are not linked to your configurations

image.png (14.52 KiB) Viewed 1540 times

If you need to hide bodies for certain views, create display states in the model and assign them to the desired views in the drawing. If not done that way, the view still generates all the "lines" for those bodies and then hides them during the view generation.

[mp3-250]

Great explaInation. I was wondering why the display state I created was as slow as hiding the bodies in the view...

[AlexLachance]

Also, while it is not all that accurate, the performance evaluation tool can be used to figure out which views are heavier then others.

[mp3-250]

I knew about the view performance, but I think it is totally unreliable in terms of numbers.
Unfortunately one drawing got slower according to that numbers another faster, but in the end annoying thing like SW "freezing" are not measured so it is a sort of relative scale to me

[AlexLachance]

I knew about the view performance, but I think it is totally unreliable in terms of numbers.
Unfortunately one drawing got slower according to that numbers another faster, but in the end annoying thing like SW "freezing" are not measured so it is a sort of relative scale to me

Yeah they're not very accurate indeed but sometimes you can see one view that has a much higher reload time then the others and you can then investigate this one. I've had section views have some kind of corruption that would get fixed by recreating them, pain in the a....