Comparing File Sizes to Increase Performance

In Solidworks, especially when working with very large assemblies, your machine’s performance may begin to suffer. This could result in slow frame rates, stuttering, long loading times, and slow graphical response between your inputs.

There are various ways of boosting your performance, however one of the best ways is to suppress non-critical components that are relatively complicated or relatively large in file size (i.e a large sub-assembly that you don’t need to be working with at the moment).

If all of your sub-assemblies and components are located within the same folder, this is an extremely simple process: simply sort your folder by “size” and note the largest components that you can suppress.

However, if your assembly is referencing multiple components from differing directories this process can become more tedious. Thankfully, there is a better way to compare the sizes of your various assembly components without having to flip back and forth between different directories constantly.

Observe the test assembly shown below:

By looking at the File -> Find References menu, we can see that the assembly has multiple components from different directories. Since the Solidworks UI does not give us a good way of seeing each component’s size, we turn to a separate Solidworks application: Solidworks Explorer.

To find this application simply navigate to the Solidworks folder in your Start Menu:

If you do not see Solidworks Explorer listed here, it’s possible that you do not have Solidworks Explorer installed. In order to install it, simply modify your Solidworks installation and choose to install Solidworks Explorer on the Product Selection screen. For more information on modifying your installation, please see the “Modification” section of this guide here: https://support.hawkridgesys.com/hc/en-us/articles/210355857-Modifying-a-2016-Installation.

Once you have Solidworks Explorer pulled up, navigate to the assembly directory via the Solidworks Explorer left hand directory pane:

Once there, simply click on the “References” tab in the right hand preview pane.

The “Reference” tab displays all top-level references within your assembly and their respective sizes. You can choose to organize them via size, name, file path, type, or date modified. This way you can quickly and easily see which sub-assembly or component could be most impacting your performance.

If you’d like to see the references contained in your sub-assemblies, you can always double click on any of the files listed under this tab and Solidworks Explorer will automatically display their references for you to see.

If you have any more questions, please contact Hawk Ridge Systems Technical Support at 877.266.4469 (US) or 866.587.6803 (Canada).