Hi gents,

In our company we work with weldment parts. We design platforms and therefore use a lot of beams and sections in our models. Parts could contain 500 bodies or more easily.

Problems occur when I exceed, let's say, the amount of 200 bodies in combination with pattern features. Rebuilt time is very, very long. Also editing features like patterns or a weldment will take ages. Very slow respond during selection of different beam type or other select boxes.

As far as I can see It has nothing to do with hardware or settings. It seems there is a magic border the user may not exceed, or you get punished!

Some time ago I had a part that had problems mentioned as above. Even when I stripped the whole part down to about 20 bodies the same problem still occured, even after saving and re-opening. I noticed the file size was still very large also. This tells me, useless data stays in the memory of the part, which could cause these problems.

Today I had the same problems with another part. File size 44 Mb. This was no weldment part, it only contained a lot of (dumm) bodies and a few skeches. Opening of this part thook about 2 minutes, also very slow during editing. Sometimes SolidWorks stalled completely and I had to do a restart.

Now knowing all this I came to the idea to save as parasolid, to open it in SolidWorks and save it back as a part. Filesize dropped immediately from 44Mb to 20Mb!!! Opening this part took 10 seconds now!!!

OK, for a part containing dumm bodies it's a good workaround but you can not use this workaround for parts containing features. In this case you will end up with dumm parts.

There have to a way to clean up the memory of the part so you get rid of the rubbish without messing up your files. I design in autoCAD 3d also and sometimes similar problems occur. In autocad you have a special command to wipe out the waist of the memory, its called "BREP". Does somebody know a simular command or action for this in SolidWorks?

Regards,

Marco