Good afternoon,
I have back-up set to every 3 minutes and yet when I am working in an embedded assembly or part file and solid works crashes, I lose everything. First, I would hope the software would be more stable, but at least I would like to try and recover what I was working on. It is very frustrating as it happens way too often. Any suggestions as to how to minimize crashes?
Thank you,
Steve
Steve,
While I am one who has been wanting more stability, it sounds like you are having more problems than usual. There are two places I would suggest you look as well and they are places that we often regard as SW cop-outs but they can be issues, 1. is your hardware up to the task and 2. are your modeling practices causing problems?
1. I know that screaming fast machines aren't vitally necessary and there is no need to spend $8,000 per machine like one of my previous employers did, but I also have experienced the problems with a 7 year old machine that at one time was up to the task but could no longer keep from crashing while running smaller assemblies. There are applications in SW RX that will check if your machine is up to the task, you might want to check them.
2. We have some assemblies here that are extremely slow and prone to crash and I am beginning to strongly suspect the modeling practice is a very large portion of the cause. Alin Vargatu has done some exceptional work showing different practices that make assemblies more stable. Here is a link to one thread where he offers suggestions large assembly best practice.
While I agree that the platform could far more stable and bug free there are too many accomplished users here that have far fewer problems than I do for me to think the problem lies entirely with SW. Just my 2 cents which probably isn't worth that much.
can you post your computer spec here?
You need to find out the cause first ?
Steve,.. that does sound like a lot.. I'd guess it is a bad install (so do a repair or reinstall).. or, hardware.. related to errors in your memory?
Have you had a chance to run a Rx on the assembly and send it to your VAR?
I have turned off back up / Auto save completely.
I've then set a reminder to remind me if I haven't saved something for 10 minutes.
Then save, save, and save all the time.
When ever you doing anything save.
It works most of the time as I think it's the back up / Auto save that causes the failure in the first place.
I very much second this idea.
The real pain of back up / auto save is that it dominates system resources without notice. Then you keep clicking and working.
If your file takes more than five seconds to completely save, turn off the automatic background task lockup loop.
It's even worse when involved in a task which takes longer than your save interval, such as Import Diagnostics, save as PDF, simulation, rendering, or really any lengthy process. Then I think the system slows down by trying to do multiple things, or at least track a pending action.
Definitely an issue somewhere, could be hardware, or workflow?
Yes SW does crash for me as well, but very little and I can almost always point it to something that I did, which those actions trip up SW and forces a hard crash. Most times is when I don't save for a long time, I get sucked up in the new design that I become tunnel brained and then after a bit I try something and it crashes.... I know that and I know better, it doesn't happen often and when it does I groan only because I didn't save enough....
So familiar.
I get caught in detailing a drawing, views, dims, details, multiple sheets and then go to do a save as PDF and boom...SW is asking what I want to save the dwg file as.
Gotta watch the momentum,
Kevin
My suggestion is :
Thanks for all the suggestions, but shouldn't the software work correctly right out of the box. SW 2018 crashes, hangs ups constantly. CPU and RAM utilization is poor at best. If I had to bill back SW for all the time lost the software would probably be free.
May also want to tell us what year and service pack you are on. Some are more prone to crashes than others.
Like mine 2017 SP5, so far not one crash. There I did it jinxed myself.
Sorry to tell you but I'm on 2017 SP5 and crash regularly.
Maybe the machine isn't as important as i thought. Mine crashes about every other week these days, on 2017 SP5.0 and I just ran the benchmark on it. Have to say I was quite impressed with the purpose built machine they made for me 2 years ago. And it only took 3 weeks after I got here to get it.
My machine is only a few months old and one of Dell's better offerings. Not the top, but almost. I crash probably once a day and I'm really not pushing the software lately. Assemblies with maybe dozens to a few hundred parts is all. Pretty wimpy stuff and SolidWorks regularly soils the bed.
Maybe you need to start over. Could be a bad Install. Now if you would have said 2014 I would have agreed with you I could not get the next version fast enough.
Steve, if you build your house on sand, how secure is your home?
SWX has built their enterprise on Windows. For over ten years I've been asking them to consider compiling in Linux with no explanation of why this couldn't be an option. I'm sure a significant number of the problems with stability and performance have to do with Windows and not necessarily things that SWX can deal with on their end.
Perhaps this is a monumental change, but its time for a monumental change. We need a dual kernel and a better software platform.
The other exhausting problem with SW is the endless "Not Responding" in Windows Resource Monitor even though I am "only" utilizing 12% of the CPU and 11% of the Physical Ram. So uninstall and reinstall should fix that Ya Right!
..which makes one ask... is there a one click, kill all solidworks processes batch file out there...?
Process Explorer from Sysinternals (.com) works very well for me to accomplish that. It's Task Manager on steroids. Windows 10 implemented some of these improvements into Task Manager. I prefer PE as I'm running Windows 7.
Yes there is a one click kill all processes, but why? If I am running 2.4GHZ Quad Core with 64GB of Ram Should it hang up? This was a brand new install of SW 2018 SP1 on WIN 7 Pro. Not a fan of WIN in any capacity. It has been discussed in these forums and on the internet the problem that SW does not utilize the CPU or RAM efficiently.
Hello,
There has been a recent discussion on this, go here ONE and TWO
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Cheers,
Kevin