New in AM2004c: Performance Improvements

EDM Server

The source code of the EDM Server was reviewed to identify potential bottlenecks. As a result a total of 15 optimizations are made. ranging from optimizations in the database engine to optimizing the way the EDM server interacts with Windows Domain Controllers.

PowerUser and other clients

At the client side of the software, it was possible to reduce the number of calls to the server for several actions. Also some actions were rewritten to be more efficient. This resulted in a more responsive PowerUser.

CAD Links

The AutoCAD, Inventor, SolidWorks and MicroStation links were reviewed, and bottlenecks identified. Specifically the AutoCAD and Inventor links will benefit significantly from these optimizations.

Typical Examples

What follows are some typical examples in which performance improvements were reached. Note that the actual performance gain depends on a large number of parameters. As a result the performance improvement measured in your situation can be both more and less than indicated here.

Security on Work Areas

In a large vault containing over 100,000 documents and a large number of work areas, performance suffered when security was used in the workareas. In that case the CPU load on the server would reach very high levels and it was hardly possible to work in that vault with 80 users or more. Optimizations were made such that the performance of the system with security on work areas is now comparable to the performance without security.

November last year Hydro One (Canada) claimed that the performance of the system was no longer acceptable when using security on WorkAreas. Because they have only 85 PowerUsers a big question mark arised why the performance was so bad, for that reason development started an investigation what might be the cause. A special version of Meridian was created and installed on-site. All good results which were visible during the test of this version in the Cyco office were not visible for Hydro. Disappointment for everybody!

Because it was so difficult to reproduce the problems Hydro had it was decided to send two developers, Oleg and Andrey, to Hydro and creates a fix on-site.

They did a very good job and were able to completely turnaround the user’s aversion against meridian into a very positive attitude. The processor load is reduced to a very acceptable level and the responsiveness of the PowerUser is very good.

All knowledge build up during this weeks is included in this 2004C release.

The people of Hydro One are happy again!

Opening Inventor assemblies

Opening very large Inventor assemblies of up to 1,500 parts took an extremely long time - sometimes more than 40 minutes. After optimizing the way the CAD links query and cache reference information from the EDM server this time has now be reduced to less than 10 minutes in a typical environment. This optimization affects not only the Inventor link, but also AutoCAD, SolidWorks and MicroStation.

Polymac

Polymac (Holland) had serious problems when working with Inventor. Here only ten users are working on the system simultaneously so we really had no clue where to search for the cause of this. They claimed the performance was much better in 2003B release and was getting worse after every update. First we tried an upgrade to 2004B but that did not help, even worse it had a negative impact. The users experienced open assembly times of 40 minutes instead of the expected 8 or 9 minutes.

On request development created a logging feature in the inventor link which made it possible to log what happens in the background. With this information development had a good starting point to search for the bottlenecks in the software. Several areas’s are found which could be improved.

During the development process the fixes are brought in by Polymac immediately after claiming. We saw the performance was getting better with every new build. After installing the final fix the open time was in line with the expectations again!

Philips DAP (Cadix Automatisering)

Philips DAP (Holland) also claimed their inventor assembly open time was unacceptable. They gave us the possibility to come up with a solution in a short timeframe (July 1st deadline) otherwise using meridian should no longer be continued. We have been on-site and here we did measurements also. These measurements indicated that the problem is exactly the same as for Polymac so we can conclude that their problem is solved just in time and we will prove that on-site July 1st!

Saving AutoCAD files

Saving AutoCAD files with multiple title blocks with a large number of properties could take a long time (around 30 seconds for 120 individual properties). This is now optimized and takes only a few seconds.

 AutoCAD is heavily used at Metra (Italy). They have drawings with multiple title blocks and claimed that a safe operation of such a drawing is close to 30 seconds instead of one or two seconds if they do the same action outside meridian. The situation escalated seriously and the AutoCAD link is optimized now in resolving references and updating title blocks. This reduced the save operation time from 30 seconds to just a few seconds.

Their answer: “everything works, save is very fast”!