Common Practices that may Impact Large Assembly Performance

Learn about common practices that can impact large assembly performance.

• Practice: Overuse of Adaptivity

  Impact: It can lead to performance problems at the assembly level because the part geometry must be updated along with assembly constraints. All impacted parts are recomputed.

  Best Practice: Use adaptivity discreetly. Adaptive relationships must have a clear adaptor and adaptee defined to avoid cyclic relationships. Cascading adaptive relationships should be avoided, i.e. Part1 drives Part2 and Part2 drives Part3. Consider using Skeletal modeling instead. After using adaptivity, consider turning adaptivity off until model updates occur, then turn it on and allow it to resolve. Then, turn it off until the next change.

• Issue: An under-constrained subassembly. Components within the subassembly are constrained to subassembly origin planes, axes, or point.

  Impact: The flexible subassembly exposes all the degrees of freedom within the subassembly. The subassembly origin planes can be moved and all components constrained to the origin planes will move. Their DOF at the top level assembly becomes confusing.

  Best Practice: Ground the flexible subassembly. If components within the subassembly have DOF and they are supposed to be free, avoid creating constraints to subassembly origin planes, axes, or point.

• Issue: Top-level assembly is left at the older version while some of its components are saved in newer versions. Opening the top-level assembly in older version of Inventor and keep working on it can lead to corruption.
• Issue: Low system memory (machines with <16GB)

  Impact: Depending on geometric complexity and assembly levels, Inventor may require more memory than the minimum 8GB. For a typical 10K component assembly, it takes about 3GB to fully load the assembly. If there are other processes running at the same time, Windows use swap (hard drive) memory. When it happens, it will slow down Inventor operation.

  Solution: Increase system memory to avoid hard drive memory swapping.

• Issue: Use derived parts in drawing views.

  Impact: To reduce complexity some have resorted to using derive on large assemblies before creating views. When a derived component is used in a detail view, the entire model is calculated for creating the view instead of just the participating components. This has a negative performance impact.

  Best Practice: Avoid the practice of using Derived or simplified models with Detail drawing views.

• Issue: Using complex sketch patterns for extruded features, such as cutouts.

  Impact: Modeling features like threads, patterned cutouts, etc. can impact performance, particularly when editing the component or using patterns of these components in assemblies. For example, think of a wire fence component which was created using cutouts and, then, is patterned as a component in the assembly.

  Best Practice: Use Appearances (textures) to represent the cutouts. You can still see through the gaps without having to model the cuts. You can apply an iproperty override to provide the correct mass properties for CoG investigations, etc.

• Practice: Leaving Contact Solver running after using it.

  Impact: Doing so can affect performance. If not using it, turn it off.

  Best Practice: Develop the habit of turning it off when finished performing a contact analysis.