CPU Usage with Windows 7 64 bit, NX6
CPU Usage with Windows 7 64 bit, NX6
(OP)
Hello,
I just got a new computer and have been using NX6 on it. It is much faster and I do like it quite a bit. It is a Dell Precision M6600 running windows 7 64 bit. When I run NX6 the processor usage only gets up to about 7 percent. It seems like there should be a way to make the processor run at full speed to make NX6 run even fast. Any ideas on how to do this? I would rather not overclock anything just yet (new computer and all).
Thanks,
I just got a new computer and have been using NX6 on it. It is much faster and I do like it quite a bit. It is a Dell Precision M6600 running windows 7 64 bit. When I run NX6 the processor usage only gets up to about 7 percent. It seems like there should be a way to make the processor run at full speed to make NX6 run even fast. Any ideas on how to do this? I would rather not overclock anything just yet (new computer and all).
Thanks,





RE: CPU Usage with Windows 7 64 bit, NX6
John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
http://www.siemens.com/plm
UG/NX Museum: http://www.plmworld.org/p/cm/ld/fid=209
To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
RE: CPU Usage with Windows 7 64 bit, NX6
NX is not multithreaded, so its 100% usage is only taxing the total system at 7%.
"Wildfires are dangerous, hard to control, and economically catastrophic."
Ben Loosli
RE: CPU Usage with Windows 7 64 bit, NX6
There are 4 cores.
I tried to see what I could do to get the CPU usage up, so I opened 2 sessons of NX4 and 2 sessions of NX6, 1 session of Vericut, and about 10 ie windows. Had programs generating in all the UG sessions and a vericut program running. Got the cpu up to about 20 to 30 percent.
I just thought there should be a way to max out the processor and make everything run faster.
Thank you.
RE: CPU Usage with Windows 7 64 bit, NX6
John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
http://www.siemens.com/plm
UG/NX Museum: http://www.plmworld.org/p/cm/ld/fid=209
To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
RE: CPU Usage with Windows 7 64 bit, NX6
"Wildfires are dangerous, hard to control, and economically catastrophic."
Ben Loosli
RE: CPU Usage with Windows 7 64 bit, NX6
I guess my desire is that the CPU usage would just max out so that the program generation would complete faster. I guess the GPU could be causing the delay and the CPU is just kind of sitting around waiting for most of the time?
RE: CPU Usage with Windows 7 64 bit, NX6
Mark Rief
Product Manager
Siemens PLM
RE: CPU Usage with Windows 7 64 bit, NX6
what is this magic you speak of? Parrellel generation? How do you do that? I only see the generate button currently.
Thank you.
RE: CPU Usage with Windows 7 64 bit, NX6
UGII_SMP_ENABLE=1
John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
http://www.siemens.com/plm
UG/NX Museum: http://www.plmworld.org/p/cm/ld/fid=209
To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
RE: CPU Usage with Windows 7 64 bit, NX6
What does SMP mode actually do? I set the env var and I do notice that it runs different. Before setting the variable the generated path ran slowly but smoothly. Now its jumpy and is not as smooth.
Thank you,
RE: CPU Usage with Windows 7 64 bit, NX6
Now there are a couple of other 'special' situations which also benefit from multi-cores, one of them being the new 'parallel tool path generation' that Mark talked about. This is not really multi-threading in the classical sense, but rather multi-processing where a second process it launched in an un/under-used core which then runs in 'parallel' to the regular NX process. Another example of where this is done is if you use the built-in Movie capture functionality which was added in NX 6.0. Again, this is an example of multi-processing and not really multi-threading. And in these special cases that variable has no effect, rather the system just knows that this can work or not based on the system configuration, whereas for the SMP or multi-threading support inside the software, this must be enabled (using the environment variable) BEFORE NX is launched in order to make sure that NX will run in that mode.
Anyway, I hope I didn't confuse you too much.
John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
http://www.siemens.com/plm
UG/NX Museum: http://www.plmworld.org/p/cm/ld/fid=209
To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
RE: CPU Usage with Windows 7 64 bit, NX6
Thank you for the info. I am not too confused, my inner geek is coming out a little though. Does parrellel tool path generation run automatically or do you have a different option in UG to select?
Thank you,
RE: CPU Usage with Windows 7 64 bit, NX6
John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
http://www.siemens.com/plm
UG/NX Museum: http://www.plmworld.org/p/cm/ld/fid=209
To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
RE: CPU Usage with Windows 7 64 bit, NX6
--
Bill
RE: CPU Usage with Windows 7 64 bit, NX6
You need to specifically choose the parallel generate task instead of the normal generate. In NX 7.5 and 8 there is a separate icon for this. I'm not sure what is available in NX6. You can just run down the line and create a cue of operations that are assigned to the parallel generate function and it will just knock them off one after another behind the scenes. It works very well.
NX 7.5.4, NX 8.0.1.5
Tecnomatix Quality 8.0.1.3
PC-DMIS 2011 MR1
RE: CPU Usage with Windows 7 64 bit, NX6
As for hyperthreading I seem to remember and old post that NX did not play well with it. Anyone else have info on it?
NX 7.5
RE: CPU Usage with Windows 7 64 bit, NX6
John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
http://www.siemens.com/plm
UG/NX Museum: http://www.plmworld.org/p/cm/ld/fid=209
To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
RE: CPU Usage with Windows 7 64 bit, NX6
UG NX3/NX4/NX6
Vericut 5/6/7
AutoCAD LT
RE: CPU Usage with Windows 7 64 bit, NX6
Parallel Generate was first introduced in NX 7, and enhanced in 7.5 and 8.
You access it with right mouse button on the selected operation(s). You can also turn on the button on the Operations tool bar.
Currently (NX 8) there are 2 customer defaults to control the behavior:
Maximim Concurrent Processes - Set this from 1 to 8. Windows will distribute the processes across the cores as needed.
Create Multiple Processes - On/Off - if you select multiple operations at once, you can process them sequentially in one process, or have the system split them up if there are no interdependencies (such as IPW).
If you want to start processing and then go home for the night, you should also look at batch processing, which has been available for over ten years.
Mark Rief
Product Manager
Siemens PLM
RE: CPU Usage with Windows 7 64 bit, NX6
@rg006
One thing I would like to add...if you set your maximum concurrent processes to the same as the number of cores you have, processing on all core at once may make your UI sluggish. On my quad core computer I set it to three.
Now if only I could talk my manager into a 6-core or dual 4-core computer.
NX 7.5
RE: CPU Usage with Windows 7 64 bit, NX6
Thanks for all the help guys.
UG NX3/NX4/NX6
Vericut 5/6/7
AutoCAD LT
RE: CPU Usage with Windows 7 64 bit, NX6
Should read..."I was just going to post he doesn't have it in nx6."
Yes, there are some very nice changes in 7, 7.5 and 8. I am anxious to use 8 as well.
NX 7.5
RE: CPU Usage with Windows 7 64 bit, NX6
Mark Rief
Product Manager
Siemens PLM
RE: CPU Usage with Windows 7 64 bit, NX6
Do you ONLY have 4Gb in total in Windows 7 64 bit ?
Then i would suggest that your tests with multiple sessions the limiting factor is the RAM, not the CPU or GPU.
You are waiting for the computer to swap internal memory to disk.
I think that Siemens recommends 8 Gb for Windows 7 64 bit as minimum. (?)
Check the task manager and look up the "ugraf.exe" in the "processes" view and note how much memory it has allocated.
Regards,
Tomas
RE: CPU Usage with Windows 7 64 bit, NX6
The most I have ever got my RAM usage up to is 73% with 6 sessions of NX running, veritcut running, and about 10 ie windows open (just for fun). Right now, I have two assemblies (each has about 6-10 piece parts), and about 5 other parts open and my RAM usage is getting up to about 2.2GB (49%) right now.
I do plan on upgrading the RAM sometime as needed, but right now I am just testing to see what kind of performance I can get out of the box. I plan on getting it to 8GB of RAM in the future.
Thanks for the information,
UG NX3/NX4/NX6
Vericut 5/6/7
AutoCAD LT
RE: CPU Usage with Windows 7 64 bit, NX6
I forgot to say that the memory allocation for one session of NX6 with an assembly that has 15 piece parts is 232MB.
Thanks,
UG NX3/NX4/NX6
Vericut 5/6/7
AutoCAD LT
RE: CPU Usage with Windows 7 64 bit, NX6
Currently our cnc programmers' computers have 12GB of ram. On our average projects we are seeing 4-6GB ram usage but our larger parts are using 6-8GB and recently I had a certain operation max my ram. I assume it maxxed then ran out of virtual memory because the result was not expected. That particular operation was z-level profile using a reference tool and the part model was fairly large. Those crunch fairly hard and perhaps I should've separated that cut into two operations.
NX 7.5
RE: CPU Usage with Windows 7 64 bit, NX6
Thanks
RE: CPU Usage with Windows 7 64 bit, NX6
Being that any single session of NX can only utilize a maximum of four cores (except for NX Nastran, can do much better), unless you're going to be running other compute intenseive applications simultaneously with NX, I'd opt for the first configuration.
But in the end, if you have access to both systems, run some tests of your own.
John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
http://www.siemens.com/plm
UG/NX Museum: http://www.plmworld.org/p/cm/ld/fid=209
To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
RE: CPU Usage with Windows 7 64 bit, NX6
This is no fluke, because the file I am working in took about an hour or more to update in March. Now, minutes (haven't clocked it). I guess I am wondering why this has occurred without a whisper from anybody. It was brought in with a GM update that "got rid of the cat" (GM contractor's know what I mean).
I have run SMP for years on several machines, with several config's with about the same performance boost (not much, but better than a sharp stick in the eye). Some config'ed by the same IT guy that did this one; he did nothing remarkably different. Any ideas?
RE: CPU Usage with Windows 7 64 bit, NX6
UG NX3/NX4/NX6
Vericut 5/6/7
AutoCAD LT
RE: CPU Usage with Windows 7 64 bit, NX6
I'm not sayin...just sayin, LOL.
NX 7.5