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Different people define large assemblies differently, but it is safe enough to say that an assembly can be considered “large” if working in it taxes your computer. You could have 10,000 parts with 3 features each, or 10 parts with 3000 features. Unless you are working with a lot of in-context relations and other assembly features, the main measure of what will slow down your computer will be mates. If you put your assembly together wisely, you can avoid some of the common pitfalls and create large assemblies that perform well.

Your approach to getting more performance out of your assemblies should encompass a combination of specialized tools and techniques discussed in this and other chapters. Most of the tools referenced in this chapter are discussed in more detail in Chapter 4, although Chapter 4 does not reference the purpose of these tools as being specifically for use with large assemblies.

Using special techniques to improve large assembly performance

SolidWorks is imperfect software. However, that doesn't mean that every time a challenge presents itself you should just throw up your arms and curse the software. For most problems that you come across in SolidWorks, there is something you can do to improve the situation. These things may not be ideal, but they give you something positive you can do, and it sure beats complaining.

So, in the spirit of making the most out of long rebuild times and waiting for the software to give you back control, here are some suggestions for techniques you can use to improve the performance of SolidWorks when working with large assemblies.

Working locally

Working locally does not help in processing time, but it does help in any save or retrieval times. This might come into play if you open an assembly in lightweight mode, and later have to resolve some parts. When SolidWorks has to reach out over the network to get data, it is always slower than getting parts off your local hard drive. Working locally is something that any PDM program is going to enforce.

Organizing data into subassemblies

When SolidWorks opens an assembly, it has to solve all the mates in the top-level assembly. It doesn't touch the mates in subassemblies unless the subassembly is set to be solved as a flexible subassembly. Therefore, obviously, minimizing the number of mates in the top-level assembly is an advantage. One great way to do that is to have no parts at the top level, only subassemblies, and then mates to locate the subassemblies. Make sure the mates go to something stable, like assembly planes or an assembly sketch.

Avoiding in-context references

In-context references have a well-documented affect on assembly performance. Chapter 10 deals with this topic directly. It can't be stressed enough how important it is to avoid this kind of modeling, especially at the top level of the assembly. For performance reasons, it might be a better idea to look into replacing in-context techniques with master model or multi-body modeling. This is not to say you should replace assemblies with multi-body part models, just that the external reference part of the modeling process can be more efficiently handled by external references between parts, without the assembly.

If you find yourself in a situation with an assembly that already has many in-context references, you may want to use the Lock References option in the List External References dialog. Do not fall into the trap of breaking references, because broken references cannot be repaired. Broken and Locked references perform at the same speed, but locked references can be reestablished later if you need to propagate some changes.

Avoid fancy display settings

Transparent parts and edges in shaded mode are probably the two display settings that cost you a far amount of time. If you use these for parts in large assemblies, just be aware that it will cost you a price in terms of performance.

Repairing errors

A huge time waster is when SolidWorks users continue working in a large assembly when there are errors. Each time SolidWorks