Recommendations for Memory Allocation Page 1 of 2

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Concept: Recommendations for Memory Allocation

Recommendations for Memory Allocation
The biggest influences on performance are the amount of RAM in your machine and how that RAM is used by
Simulate. The amount of memory that is used during an analysis depends on several factors, including the
complexity of the model, the desired accuracy of the solution, and the type of analysis or design study you are
running. You can see how much total memory an analysis takes by looking at the bottom of the Summary tab of
the Run Status dialog box and viewing the maximum memory usage (kilobytes).

If the maximum memory usage of Simulate plus the memory used by the operating system exceed the amount of
RAM in your machine, then the operating system swaps data between RAM and the hard disk (which seriously
degrades the performance of your applications). To achieve maximum performance, you want to make sure that
the maximum memory usage is less than the amount of RAM in your machine.

For very large models, the global stiffness matrix requires the most memory during an analysis. You can see how
big the global stiffness matrix is by looking on the Checkpoints tab of the Run Status dialog box (also in the .pas
file in the study directory), and viewing the size of global matrix profile (mb).

Simulate enables you to limit the amount of memory the global stiffness matrix consumes by setting the Memory
Allocation field in the Solver Settings area of the Run Settings dialog box. This Memory Allocation setting is called
solram. With this setting, you allocate a fixed amount of memory in which to hold slices of the global stiffness
matrix that the linear equation solver works with at any one time. If the global stiffness matrix is too big to fit in
solram, Simulate swaps part of the matrix back and forth between disk and RAM using a specialized swapping
algorithm that is more efficient than the general swapping algorithm used by the operating system. You need
enough swap space, to fit the entire job, and disk space, for results and temporary files. The log file, .stt, monitors
usage.

The following are some suggestions and guidelines you can use to improve performance:

• Exit other applications, if possible, so that Simulate can use as much RAM as possible.
◦ You can also exit Simulate. The analysis keeps running in the background. The progress can be
monitored by viewing the .rpt file.

• Set the engine memory allocation (solram) wisely.

◦ Set solram low enough so that the total memory used by Simulate is less than your total amount of
RAM. The ideal amount to set for solram is between 25 to 50 percent of RAM. If nothing else is running
on your system, set solram to 50 percent of the available RAM.

◦ If possible, set solram high enough so that the global stiffness matrix fits in solram.

• If you use a 32-bit Window operating system, the maximum amount of memory that any one application can
use is 3.2 GB.

• Solram is currently limited to a maximum of 16 GB.

The other major factor that influences performance is disk usage. During an analysis, Simulate writes all of its
results to disk. Also, Simulate temporarily stores on disk intermediate data that is required during the analysis.
The following guidelines should help improve performance:

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Recommendations for Memory Allocation Page 2 of 2

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• Occasionally defragment your disks so that data can be written and read in large contiguous blocks.

• Use fast hard drives.

• Use disk striping with a redundant array of independent disks (RAID) to increase IO performance.

• Use a RAM disk instead of a hard disk.

• Use a solid-state drive instead of a hard disk drive.

• You can use multiple disks for temporary files by using a batch command.

• Simulate will use all available processors, multi-threading, by default. It is possible to limit this if other
applications are running.

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