Helpful Tips for Managing SOLIDWORKS Drawings Performance

Let’s talk about five ways to manage SOLIDWORKS Drawing performance. The five ways mentioned will be focused on helping to manage performance while in drawings. Managing performance is important to speed up your workflow and understand the factors that affect your opening and rebuilding times. Performance varies on each individual machine, and a crucial piece to optimizing performance in SOLIDWORKS is ensuring the software is installed on a system with appropriate drivers and hardware.

1) Performance Evaluation (Evaluate > Performance Evaluation)

The Performance Evaluation tool, we use to analyze a drawing’s open and rebuild time. This tool also includes drawing statistics such as how many drawing views, types of drawing views, types of annotations in the drawing etc. When we run the evaluation tool, I notice most of the rebuilt time is spent loading the view palate. After clearing out the palate, we no longer rebuild those views in our palate while they are in the background.

2) Detailing Practices

Drawing view types such as high quality/draft quality will affect drawing performance depending on the selection. Let’s talk about a couple of practices to optimize performance. When it comes to view types, any view that requires cutting the model, such as section views require heavy system calculations.

Draft quality views usually are much faster performance compared to high quality views. The red arrow is pointing to the “shaded” display style, this only displays in draft quality. The current selection in the picture is, shaded with edges, this will load edge information, thus affecting performance.

3) System Options

There are several important system options you should be aware of to help optimize performance. System options affect all documents on a user’s system, while document properties are specific to the document. The first tip is turning off auto populating the view palate, which I discussed earlier. Second tip, controlling global setting of any view placed in a drawing will inherit high quality vs draft.

4) Open Options

Now, I won’t talk about every single open mode available in drawings, you will just have to take our amazing Drawings ANSI course! However, let me share a couple tips for optimizing performance. Usually, most components you probably are used to working with are set to resolved. When a component is set to resolved, all feature information for model is loaded. Lightweight mode will not load feature information, however, you still have access to all properties and commands in the drawing. If you launch a command that requires the model to become resolved, you will be prompted with a message.

5) Detached Drawings

There is a way for detailing operations to be completed without loading referenced models. You create a detached drawing by first going to save as and changing the drawing type. For SOLIDWORKS versions 2019 and older, these are the only option for detailing without loading the referenced model. However, since 2020, the need to save out detached drawings is no longer required to get this performance benefit.