Document Speed

wayne_sauder

 What ideas are others using to increase the speed of documents? 
 I have an assembly that is getting rather large and slow. It is built with a lot of linked subassemblies, most of the linked assemblies contain less than 10 mates except a few that use a good bit of standard content, (and no don't get me started on maintaining all the links, a headache all it's own) I found that this speeds things up some but I need to add a number more parts yet, and find that I spend a lot of time waiting. I considered exporting and reimporting and that does gain some speed however it also breaks all the connections to the metadata which is part of the appeal of Onshape. This assembly does have a lot of motion with limits. I can't post the document but here is a screenshot of the performance tab. This is on a mac M1Max.  
 Are there any tips or tricks that others have learned along the way? 

shawn_crocker

This is the one scary part of Onshape.  I personally feel sort of powerless with taking control over how fast my stuff goes.  But with solidworks, it wasn't that different when I used it.  It doesn't use multiple cores so I found I wasn't able to do much to make it go faster either.  I usual fairly successfully overcome waiting for things by constantly changing lanes.  I try to always know of multiple things I am going to need to do so as soon as I open a linked document lets say, I immediately switch back and continue doing a different task that needs to be done while the other thing loads up.  Often I will have two or more projects being worked on at the same time.  One project that is in the drawing phase and is a large slow assembly that is even worst in the drawings environment.  The other is something I am just starting.  If I do something in the drawing that is clearly going to take a minute to process(like clicking the redraw button), I switch back.  I don't care if it takes three hours to finally finish a drawing as long as I only have to visit it for a few minutes at a time and never have to wait.  Having many tabs working on different things doesn't seem to negatively impact any of them noticeably for me.  I think using many tabs in the browser is our way of forcing the onshape system to work hard for us.  Just always keep one or two tabs crunching numbers at all times.  So I guess my advise it work around cause I haven't found a great way to deal with it either.  Sometimes it just seems like those amazon servers are just overloaded.

tim_hess427

I've heard that tangent mates are particularly intensive to calculate. Maybe its worth trying to replace those with something else, if possible? Or, maybe try suppressing those motes momentarily to see if that speeds things up?

NeilCooke

Limits are more compute intensive. 

tim_hess427

Interesting. Good to know!

homebrewdesign

Once I get everything in place I suppress all mates and make one big group.

billy2

On patterned components, I'll change their resolution in the parts studio. The effect in an assembly, it speeds things up. I've never seen an assembly slow down from it's mates. I try to keep mates to 10 mates/assy. Not for speed but for sanity. I have seen complex patterned parts slow things down from a graphics perspective.

Can you please post a picture of your monster assembly?

wayne_sauder

 I will try to post a bit more when I have this in a state to do so. At this point, I am working on setting up configurations to easily turn things on and off. I also got rid of a lot of the tangent mates and quite a few mate limits, this has brought the speed up some and I can at least work. I don't have experience with other CAD software but if the little spinner goes for more than about 20 to 30 sec I consider the document unworkable and if things don't happen almost instantly I'm looking for ways to speed things up. Has Onshape spoiled me?
 @billy2
 I'll try to post a screenshot when the document is a bit more complete.    

billy2

There's 2 schools of thought using CAD. Buy a faster computer or plan for the future. 

Having run pro/e on a pentium computer, computers will never be fast enough.

It's best to have strategies to keep your models working fast. Surprising, it will scale to a very large size with some minor tweaking and management. When things slow down, try and figure out why. Turning those things off is a great strategy. CAD is all about making things go away and then making them come back.

I rarely use tangent mate. I prefer things that are more deterministic.

homebrewdesign

Something I found out while with my former employer is that Onshape has an undisclosed document (memory) size limit. I had several documents become unstable and unresponsive due to this. It was usually due to too many mates but also some high resolution jpegs in my title block. I don't know the process behind how the data is managed, but the way I remember it being explained is that with each line of recorded history it is snapshotting the entire document and adding it on top of the previous one (I'm probably way off here, so don't take my word for gospel). Support would tell me that I could make about 50 more recorded moves before my document would become unresponsive again after they freed up memory for me.

christopher_dziuba

Thankyou @homebrewdesign That's exactly the information I've been looking for!