SolidWorks 2009 Performance Thoughts by Mack Rasmussen
Autumn is upon us and another new release of SolidWorks has been rolled out. At Alignex, we have been working with
SolidWorks 2009 since its early beta days. The word from SolidWorks corporate from the very beginning was that this release was all about performance. Many of the enhancements in 2009 are things done under the hood so to speak to achieve speed improvements. In the statistics below keep in mind that SolidWorks is using assemblies that are between 5 thousand and 10 thousand components in size.
Like many CAD users, I too am interested in performance and I wanted to test the speed claims on real world data. I use the same customer data set (a good sized assembly) that I've had since the SolidWorks 2003 timeframe. I've used this data set to test each release of SolidWorks since 2003 for stability, compatibility, and to look for regression issues. Although I can't show you the actual assembly because of its proprietary nature, I can show you some statistics from it so that you can get a sense of what it's like size wise.
Here we see the SolidWorks specific statistics like total number of parts, etc.
Below, you can see some file size statistics from this data set over different releases of SolidWorks. 2009 SP0 keeps heading in the right direction in regards to file size. This is the second smallest file size I've recorded to date! In each case the size is determined by migrating the data set from the previous release using the migration wizard in SolidWorks, and then the size on disk is recorded. 
Once the data was migrated into the 2009 format I did some quick time testing versus 2008 doing common tasks in drafting using this assembly. Keep in mind that the assembly I'm using for these tests is quite a bit smaller than the ones SolidWorks used to gage their performance increases, so I suspect that the larger the size of the assembly, the larger the scale of the performance increase you'll see.
The *most* important thing to keep in mind in all this is that I didn't have to do anything different process wise in 2009 in order to see these gains. In other words, I didn't have to use any New Commands or New Techniques in 2009 (and there are quite a few) to see these gains. These are raw gains that result from nothing more than migrating the data into the 2009 format, and then executing the same commands that I had in 2008. If you were to use some of the new capabilities in 2009 (like Speedpak) then the delta in performance would be even greater in 2009's favor. 
As always, I recommend that all SolidWorks customers give some careful consideration to making the switch before you do it. Planning and preparation are the keys to a successful rollout of a new release. If you have any questions whatsoever about this please call our helpdesk to talk over your plans with one of our certified application engineers, or get in touch with your account rep from Alignex and they can point you in the right direction.
Mack Rasmussen
Director of Technical Support
Alignex Inc.