I'm wondering if this has ever happened to anyone else:  I am running a static study on a fairly small assembly, details posted below. The study typically takes a little over two hours to solve (on the counter), however star.exe stops responding several times during the solve, usually for 5 to 10 minutes.  This pushes the actual solve time closer to four hours.  During the periods where star.exe hangs, CPU usage is at 0-1%, no significant hard drive, memory, or network activity.  It will be running fine (80-90% CPU usage), then will quit for several minutes, then pick up right where it left off.  This seems to occur only during the portion of the study when it is solving the contact constraints.  I've noticed the problem while using the FFE plus solver, but not while using the Direct Sparse solver.  Any idea why this would be happening?

As many details as I can think to list:

PC:

Dell Precision T3500

Xeon W3550 CPU

12GB ram

nVIDIA Quadro FX 4800 gfx card

dual 80GB 10k RPM SATA drives (RAID 0)

Windows 7 (64-bit)

SolidWorks 2010 SP4.0 (64-bit)

Model:

Curvature-based mesh

0.6 in Max element size

0.04 in Min element size

8 points in circle

3 element growth ratio

Global contact: bonded, incompatible mesh

30 to 40 contact sets, all are No Penetration, 0.05 friction, surface-to-surface mesh

DOF: 1055910

Nodes: 363575

Elements: 225944

Solver: FFE plus