Hello to all,

Welcome to the new edition of the SOLIDWORKS Support Monthly News!  This monthly news blog is co-authored by members of the SOLIDWORKS Technical Support teams worldwide.

Keep an eye on those GDI’s

By Tor Iveroth

Most processes (applications) in Windows that display graphical objects and formatted text use up a system resource called Graphical Device Interface (GDI) handles. By default, each process has a limit of 10,000 GDI handles. If the process exceeds this limit, the process will become unstable and hang or crash.

You can view the current GDI handles for a process via the Windows Task Manager by adding the “GDI Objects” column.

Since SOLIDWORKS PDM primarily use the Windows Explorer process when you work with files and folders within a file vault view, running out of available GDI handles can lead to stability problems.

The more Explorer windows you have open on a system, combined with the content displayed in the folders, the more GDI handles the process will use. So the longer you keep your system running, the higher the chance is that you will eventually hit the limit.

If the Explorer process runs out of available GDI handles, the system will likely freeze up and crash. In many cases this will seem like the system is “randomly” crashing as you would likely not be aware ahead of the crash that the GDI handles might be the cause.

To avoid this from happening you can close additional Explorer windows, which in turn will release GDI handles. Restarting the system or the Explorer process will also release the GDI handles.

To help monitor the GDI handles and prevent random stability issues, SOLIDWORKS PDM 2019 adds a new Resource Monitor feature that will show a warning if the Explorer process is reaching the GDI handle limit. You can read more about this feature in Knowledge Base Solution S-075339.

For SOLIDWORKS PDM 2018 and older versions, you can use the GDI monitor tool in Knowledge Base Solution S-072801 to help identify processes using up many GDI handles.

SOLIDWORKS 2019 New Graphics Architecture – BETA ONLY

By Nicole Phillips

For model display, SOLIDWORKS 2019 uses a new graphics architecture for parts and assemblies. This new architecture is still in BETA form and it is NOT recommended for production data currently.

This architecture provides a more responsive, real-time display, especially for large models. It takes advantage of modern OpenGL (4.5) and hardware-accelerated rendering to maintain a high level of detail and frame rate when you pan, zoom, or rotate large models. These performance improvements scale up with the higher-end graphics cards not fully supported in previous versions of SOLIDWORKS. These changes do not apply to drawings.

To turn on the new architecture in SOLIDWORKS 2019 (for non-production environment), select Tools > Options > System Options > Performance and select Enable graphics performance (Beta feature, requires SOLIDWORKS restart).

Noteworthy Solutions from the SOLIDWORKS Knowledge Base

Why do SOLIDWORKS® products fail to install if Windows® Update KB 2999226 is missing?
For more information, see Solution Id: S-075133.

In the SOLIDWORKS® PCB software, how do I export design rules?
For more information on the steps, see Solution Id: S-075077.

What could cause the SOLIDWORKS® PDM 2018 SP4 task add-in (SWTaskAddin) for ‘Print’, ‘Convert’ and ‘Design Checker’ to become unstable and crash Windows® Explorer and the Administration tool?
To see scenarios that cause the issue and to resolve this issue, follow the steps in Solution Id: S-075257.

How can I reduce the time SOLIDWORKS® Simulation takes to display result plots?
See Solution Id: S-075032.

In SOLIDWORKS® Flow Simulation, why do I see a “negative pressure” warning?
For more information, see Solution Id: S-075083.

That’s it for this month. Thanks for reading this edition of SOLIDWORKS Support News. If you need additional help with these issues or any others, please contact your SOLIDWORKS Value Added Reseller.

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