Hi All,

I know this issue has been raised a fair bit already, most of the blogs though I have read haven't been able to shed any light, neither has our SW support. I work for an industrial refrigeration company in Australia, where we design and build refrigeration skids for Mining & commercial applications. A typical skid assembly will have many components, parts & sub-assemblies including equipment, a base, pipe fittings etc. A site model e.g. for a Mining application will often incorporate several different skids along with other equipment and structures. These site models can give us a lot of grief due to the total file size and leads to significantly slowed workflow in the main assembly and while producing drawing sheets. Hoping to pick everyone's brains with ideas to help increase performance in large assemblies. I have listed below some procedures which I usually perform when dealing with large assemblies, however even while doing this we still struggle with performance issues. 

1. Large assembly mode turned on

2. Image quality in drawing settings reduced to minimal

3. All components set to lightweight

I have played around with defeature, and speedpak configurations with minimal degrees of success. The defeature command I think is pretty useless for our purpose as when trying to defeature large parts or sub-assemblies as it can take forever to process and the results seems to vary greatly and often to not much effect. Speedpak seems to help somewhat and I am wondering if it is a practice that others often implement, in that when creating a large sub-assembly, always create a speedpak configuration? Can someone also explain, when the sub-assembly configuration is imported into the main "site" assembly, is all of the data from the original sub-assembly being imported also? Are there settings that need to be tweaked to optimise this? 

Ideally sometimes what I am after with site assemblies, especially doing quote jobs which are intended to be quick rough models, is a way of making a "dumb" object of each sub-assembly. Something that doesn't need to look exactly 100% accurate, but that is easier to manipulate and model. I understand what I'm asking for probably doesn't exist but thought I would check anyway.

Thanks all in advance,

Josh