Simulation Errors and Unusually Long Solve Times

Are you getting strange errors on your Simulation files?  Or are your studies taking an unusually long time to run?
Have you ever considered where your simulation results files are located?  Or had a look at the number and size of the files created when meshing and running a simulation study?

This article gives some insight into strange errors you can receive when running Simulations and the reasons behind them.

Are you are getting any of the following errors?

“mesh file access denied or bad path”
“An Unknown Error Occurred while accessing [Drive_Letter]:[Path]*.GEN”
“Security device not responding”
“A sharing violation occurred while accessing an unnamed file”
“Document ….. is corrupt and can not be saved”
“Solidworks encountered and error opening the document”

It can be because you are trying to run studies over your network, on the cloud, or on replicated or external  drives.

When you run a study a very large amount of data is written and read in the form of temporary files. These files can be in the 100’s of MB or even GB. If there is a  delay in these operations you can experience these error messages.

Running simulation studies on a network/cloud/replicated/external drive can also dramatically decrease performance. The files created in the results folder during meshing and also while an analysis is running, need constant and immediate read/write access. Having all these files transferred back and forth can significantly increase run times.

Reliability can also be an issue since if the connection goes down even momentarily, an analysis can be interrupted, thus causing a loss of data, corruption or even software instability.

Security like anti-virus and malware can also further complicate these issues because the temporary files used for either meshing or solving may be scanned or even blocked. This can cause strange behavior which is not reproducible when the analysis is run on a local hard drive.

For these reasons you should always be running simulations locally.  Not on a network, not on the cloud or replicated folders and not on external hard drives.

There are 2 places you need to check to make sure your studies are run locally. One for any newly created study and one for existing studies.

For the results location for all new studies created, in Solidworks go to Simulation-> Options-> Default options -> Results

Here you will see options for where to write the results files to.  We recommend that you use “Under sub folder” option and call it FEA or Study results so that it is easy to identify which Simulation results go with which Solidworks files.  Note, if your Solidworks part/assembly files are saved on a network/cloud/replicated or external drive this means the Simulation results will also get written and read from this drive so we recommend before running any Simulations to save the file locally, run your Simulations and then save the files back to the network.

For existing studies the location of the results can be found in the study properties by right mouse clicking on the study and going to properties

Here in the static study properties you will see the results location.  Check that this is on a local drive and not a network, external, cloud or replicated folder.  Also make sure the path is not too long, because we have seen other issue with very long paths.

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