- Looking at other ways to improve our performance
in SolidWorks, it's good to pay attention
to the local caches that we have in SolidWorks,
as well as any monitoring that might be
going on in the background.
So, as you can see here,
I've been working on a wheel loader assembly.
This is something I downloaded offline, off of grabcad.com.
Open source, CAD resource, and you can see
there's a lot of parts here and a lot of assemblies.
So as I'm working along,
I might notice that things are slowing down a little bit.
So first I'm going to do the obvious things
like turn off real graphics
and all my other heavy graphics things,
simplify my background, save that.
And then now I want to take a look at
where all of these files are being backed up
in the background.
So if you go up to options and look at backup recover,
you can see here that I've got
auto-recovery and backup set up.
Now, I'm trying to exaggerate this to send the point home
but you can see that this is looking to
auto-recover the information that's on my screen
behind me every minute and then make a backup copy
of this document every minute in this folder location.
So just by copying and pasting into Windows Explorer,
we can find our backup location.
So you can see I already had it set up here,
this is where my auto-recovery information goes
and one click up is where all of the
backup information goes.
Now, right now there's not a lot of files in here
but if you're working on many different assemblies
over time, let's say a large assembly of a ship
or an automotive vehicle or any kind of
big, large industrial project,
this is going to get full up really fast
and start eating into the storage
that you have on your machine.
So, you want to make sure that every now and again
you go in and regulate the files
that are in here.
I simply go in and just delete everything.
If I know that I'm good and I don't need these backups,
I can just go in and delete
and then I know that as I move forward,
more current backups will be dumped in here.
And the same is for the auto-recovery folder.
If you're having a lot of crashes,
this is going to be full of auto-recovery documents.
Because I haven't, it's empty right now.
But you can go ahead and just manually delete those as well.
I've actually gone ahead and placed a shortcut
to these locations right in my quick access panel.
That way I can always go in there really quick
and just make sure everything's cleared out.
And you can change that folder if you want to.
Let's say that it's filling up a location locally
on your main C drive and you're using that
for all your applications,
maybe you want to put all your backup
and auto-recovery information on an external hard drive
or another hard drive you have installed in your computer.
So for now, to increase my performance,
I'm going to turn off the auto-recovery
and I'm going to change my backup
to one copy in the same location.
Now I'm going to remove backups that are older than two days
because hopefully, I won't need any information
older than two days.
And I'm also going to turn off the save notifications
because those are going to pop up all the time.
If you've been doing CAD for a long time like me,
you know to save incrementally.
If not, keep these on but otherwise,
they're just pop ups that you have to deal with
that are just going to slow you down.
So, I'm going to go ahead and close those.
So that's taking care of my local caches just for SolidWorks
but what about my computer, right?
I'm working on a computer system,
we've talked in the past about setting your Windows up
so that it's properly running
so let's see what else we can do for that.
So I'm going to close SolidWorks right now
and I'm going to pull up a program called C Cleaner.
You can download this, just Google C Cleaner.
And what this will do is go through
and actually clear out all of the caches
that you have that are interfering with your RAM
and your storage space.
So I'm just going to click analyze.
You can see that there's over a gig of data
to be removed from my computer.
That's just out in temporary backup files
and in temporary folders on the computer.
So I'm going to hit run cleaner, say yes,
and then I'm going to switch over to the applications end
and I'm going to do the same thing.
I'm going to analyze.
Only found .5 megabytes of files but that's fine,
I'm going to run the cleaner.
And there we go.
And now all of my local caches should be clean.
Now if you want to go a step farther,
you can go to the disk cleanup.
You can just search disk cleanup down in the bottom here.
Now, if you have solid state drives or traditional drives
this will work but if you're trying to do
something like a disk de-fragmentation,
which we're all used to,
that's typically not done anymore
because solid state drives don't require it.
So, I'm going to go ahead and click OK on this,
it's looking through my system
to see if there's any extra data to be cleaned up.
It did find some temporary internet files
and some other temporary files
but as you can see, it's not a lot
so I'm not going to do that right now.
But if I did have a lot of data here,
I would just go ahead and click OK
and it would run the system cleanup.
So those are your options for cleaning out your cache.
This is just background, temporary data
which you don't need anymore.
Now if you're using PDM,
or any of those kind of vault packages,
there's a whole process involved with clearing out
those local caches, but we'll cover that
in an EPDM course in the future.
And now that we have all of our local caches clear,
we want to make sure that we don't have any active monitoring
going on that's going through and indexing these files.
So coming down to the bottom,
I can see that my CC Cleaner is still open
and actively monitoring me.
So I'm going to open that up,
go to options, monitoring, and turn that off.
I'm not going to have any system monitoring going on.
Now if you have an antivirus software
running in the background,
you're going to want to go ahead and turn off active monitoring
or active scanning while you're working in SolidWorks.
As you're making parts, it's going to be trying to scan them
and pulling them up and it's just going to
slow your computer down and bog down your resources.
So, make sure that you're cleared
from all of the working processes
in the background that you can
and this is just another way of doing that.