In the web there are a lot of manuals for optimized Settings in the Solidworks Software. But not only the settings in SWX has influence to performence, also the Settings in BIOS and OS an Grafikcard.
I found in the web a lot of smal tipps and tricks with settings for example to prevent the message that the ressources are critical.
But i found no complete Collection of tipps and tricks.
So i will start here a collection of recommented Hardware, OS and Grafikcard-Settings.
I will add an new entry for each Setting, in this first entry i will a link to the entries that are usefull, because not all you find in the web is useable help
BIOS - Fastboot
Disable the fast boot option in the Bios.
This Setting should together with other Settings in the energie management help to prefent the warning message about critical ressources
Controll Panel - Power Options - Sytemn Settings
switch off “fast startup”
→ Windows 10 Fast Startup & SOLIDWORKS | GoEngineer
This setting should together with the fast boot setting in the bios prfent the warning message about critical ressources.
System Properties - Advanced - Virtual Memory (swap file)
Adjusting Virtual Memory (Windows Pagefile) for increased SOLIDWORKS Performance
I also found manuals that says use the same size for min and max file size, other says let the decision at the system, and another says if you have enough ram you can switch off the swap file.
In my system i use the settings with same size of min and max file size. And the size is two time of ram
Wouldn’t it be better, as a start, to determine if
- it’s a new install for a first time user,
- an upgrade to a newer version on a pc with a running older version,
- an install on a new pc, with the older pc still running
This will result in a number of actions that have to be done on forehand.
Think about system settings, drawing standards, licenses, templates etc.
hello frank,
in my opinion the installation / upgrade of Solidworks is a different chapter. We can also create forum article for this job.
In this articel i want only collect items that belongs to Hardware, System-Settings in the Operating System an the Settings in the Graficcard
The title of your post “How to prepair client for solidworks installation” makes me think this is the chapter about installation.
And are you referring to Windows 10 or 11 ?
Hanjoerg
It is not as simple as you are making it out to be, some shops will on do small 10 part assembles other will do 1000 part assemblies and others will do 10,000 part assembly’s.
You need to spec the hardware to the task there are typically doing. other wise it is waste of money.
The only thing you need to do these days compared to the early days 2005 etc, is set the virtual memory up and watch the GID limits going up to 10,000 instances.
With regard to the virtual memory, is it really still important to change the config from auto to fixed at all anymore with the M.2 SSD’s installed in most newer workstations? I’ve heard this recommendation for years that it was advantageous, but it started when we were using slow spinning disk drives, and the recommendation was always fix the min and max at 2X RAM. Is this a leftover recommendation of… “because we always do that” or is there still a real benefit?
I set up a brand new system this year, and after installing Solidworks I was constantly getting “system resources are running low” messages.
Adjusting the virtual memory finally made those messages go away. I have 64GB of physical RAM, but that didn’t make any difference.
Setting Virtual memory will actually cause SW to run out of “memory”.
When importing large STEP, SW will run out of VM and crash.
I always thought this message was using some percentage of total resources in use, like 75%. The message makes sense when we only had 8gb of ram and 6gb were in use. But when you have 64gb and 48gb is in use, you aren’t nearly as close to running out.
I have 128GB Ram and still get that message, if you work on large assemblies you will get that no mater what, I just turned off notifications from SW resource manager
The help mentioned its a combination of RAM and GDI objects.
I think any application can’t have any more than 10,000 GDI objects by default as it is a Windows limit that is imposed. It appears later versions of Windows 10/11 can have this limit raised, but not sure what this can impact.
Help was old.
In the beginning, computer won’t use all available memory so “free” memory was easy to count.
After the cell phone boom, computer use “free” memory for cache to increase performance. So “free” memory is cached + unused.
Old software only look at unused as “free”.
The GoEngineer article is 4 years old, but it was still applicable to me with Windows 11 and SW 2024.
It removed the warning which incorrectly warn about leak of memory.
The solution actually put a hard cap on memory SW can use: 64GB RAM + 64GB SWAP.
Before the solution, it was 64GB RAM + all available drive space.
That reg edit was the solution to many of our early support tickets with VAR. They weren’t sure what it can impact either, they said “it doesn’t hurt anything. This is the fix.”
But, SW and PDM groups have put some stops in place to better deal with this from what I’m seeing between 2019 and 2023. But those machines still have a system wide GDI limit of 64k.
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