Manage Large Assemblies - Ways to improve performance

There are several items that the CATIA end user can change to improve performance when
working with large assemblies. Some of these changes deal with improving the performance of
local transformation (rotation, moving, and zooming), some deal with reducing the time to open
an assembly, and others deal with ways of reducing the addressable memory usage to obtain
better overall performance when working with the large assemblies.

Each of these methods is a trade off: in order to obtain better performance, the user will need to
reduce what is seen on the display, change the way saving is done, and change the way of
working with the overall large assembly.
Some of these changes can be achieved by making some changes under CATIA’s
Tools>Options, while others are done interactively with some contextual menu changes and
other selections.
The following examples show some of the changes that the end user could do to improve
performance when working on large assemblies. For detailed information on each of these
items, the user should consult the CATIA online documentation.
Examples of Interactive Changes
Use Visualization mode to improve loading time and decrease addressable memory usage.
When parts are displayed in Visualization Mode, just a subset of the data is loaded in memory.
The remaining data is loaded when needed. Switch to design mode only the parts to be edited
or needed for constraint creation.
Select the option “Do not activate default shape on open” prior to opening an assembly. This
reduces unneeded information in no-show space, and improves performance. This option
should be used in combination with the Visualization mode to further improve performance.

Manage Large Assemblies - Ways to improve performance

Removing the edges when shading improves display performance.Create Selection Sets to
manage working configurations such as multi-selecting components to be activated.
Examples of Tools – Options Changes
Lowering the level of detail displayed on the screen will improve local transformation.This is
done by increasing the setting values of the “Level of Detail” and “Pixel Culling” for “While
Moving”, so that less data is displayed while moving.
Decrease the Undo Stack. By default, the last 10 interactions can be undone at any time. But,
this option uses a lot of addressable memory. By decreasing the Undo Stack Size to 2,
addressable memory is freed up to allow the loading of larger assemblies.
Activating the use of Cache optimizes the use of Visualization Mode by reducing addressable
memory usage and the time to open the assembly.
Disable the Automatic Save. Automatic Save enables the recovery of a user’s work in case of a
CATIA crash, but in most cases, assemblies cannot be recovered after a crash. Since automatic
saves can take almost a minute for very large assemblies, disabling this option will eliminate
CATIA hangs every 30 minutes or so.

Open assemblies with every component deactivated, and activate only the Representation of
the part needed for design. This will improve local transformation performance and reduce
addressable memory usage