How to tell when SW...

[MJuric]

... or any program is really dead or just thinking?

SW in particular just says "Program not responding" and asks you if you want to close it or not pretty much anytime it is thinking whether that is 30secs or 4 hours. Some times if you just let it sit it figures it out and comes back, sometimes it never comes back or maybe it just will take seven weeks to come back.

Are there any tools, options etc that will let you know;
1) SW is dead or alive
2) Some idea how long it will be before it comes back to life if it appears dead?

[Lapuo]

... or any program is really dead or just thinking?

SW in particular just says "Program not responding" and asks you if you want to close it or not pretty much anytime it is thinking whether that is 30secs or 4 hours. Some times if you just let it sit it figures it out and comes back, sometimes it never comes back or maybe it just will take seven weeks to come back.

Are there any tools, options etc that will let you know;
1) SW is dead or alive
2) Some idea how long it will be before it comes back to life if it appears dead?

This is great question , although it always came back to me.
i never had to close it.

[mike miller]

Task Manager will tell you what resources it's using. I usually wait, even if it says SWX isn't doing anything because it almost always resurrects.

Also, I use Ctrl+S compulsively because I quit trusting SWX a long time ago.

[MJuric]

Task Manager will tell you what resources it's using. I usually wait, even if it says SWX isn't doing anything because it almost always resurrects.

Also, I use Ctrl+S compulsively because I quit trusting SWX a long time ago.

I have no letter "S" left on my keyboard and the "Q" gets used often as well [CNTRL][Q],[CNTRL][S"](Had to put the quote in there otherwise it put a strike thru everything after it ) should be a macro hot key for me.

Typically what happens to me is that I let something run. For instance I ran a simulation over the weekend. I saved it before I ran it on Friday. So I come in this morning and it appeared to run without issue. I tried to save it and it just sat there. I left it there for ~20 minutes and it never came back to me. So in essence I lost the entire weekend of the simulation. This seems to happen regularly especially with large long simulations.

Watching task manager is what I would call a "Crap shoot"....yep something is happening, but is it running the same infinitesimal loop or actually doing something productive.

Typically when it's working normally you can tell as the the usage is erratic. However typically when it's "Looping" doing the same activity over and over you can't tell. Sometimes it comes back from that, sometimes it does not.

[Merovingien]

it's very very simple,
open "mtask.exe" (windows)

first panel, search the line "SlowidWorks"
then check the CPU and/or RAM
if RAM doesn't move, but CPU move, it is alive
if CPU doesn't move, but RAM move, it is alive

if CPU and RAM are freeze, for some seconds, wait a little, recheck ? then you can kill SW.

[MJuric]

it's very very simple,
open "mtask.exe" (windows)

first panel, search the line "SlowidWorks"
then check the CPU and/or RAM
if RAM doesn't move, but CPU move, it is alive
if CPU doesn't move, but RAM move, it is alive

if CPU and RAM are freeze, for some seconds, wait a little, recheck ? then you can kill SW.

I can't remember a time where I've not seen activity on the CPU for SW. I've let SW sit for hours on a project where I was seeing CPU/Memory/Disk activity and it never came back. I've killed it, restarted and did the exact same thing and it finished in minutes/Secs.

In short I don't think CPU and memory activity is an actual predictor of whether SW is locked up or not. I mean even in simple programming you can get stuck in a loop. You'd be using memory, CPU, I/O etc...but it's never going to get out of the loop.

[jcapriotti]

A program in a unrecoverable loop would pretty much look the same to Windows as a program running normally. Then there are cases where it's just doing more than it can handle and maybe it will finish eventually if it doesn't run out of Windows resources first. Again, no way for Windows to tell the difference.

[MJuric]

A program in a unrecoverable loop would pretty much look the same to Windows as a program running normally. Then there are cases where it's just doing more than it can handle and maybe it will finish eventually if it doesn't run out of Windows resources first. Again, no way for Windows to tell the difference.

That's why I think it would be uber nice if SW added a "XXX minutes until complete" like so many installation programs do. At least then you might have a very rough ball park of what it was supposed to take and whether it was actually making any progress or just spinning it's wheels.

[Edu User Anon]

... Typically what happens to me is that I let something run. For instance I ran a simulation over the weekend. I saved it before I ran it on Friday. So I come in this morning and it appeared to run without issue. I tried to save it and it just sat there. I left it there for ~20 minutes and it never came back to me. So in essence I lost the entire weekend of the simulation. This seems to happen regularly especially with large long simulations ...

I do a lot of simulations. I've noticed that assemblies containing simulations/motion-studies always take waaay longer to save. If you check the assembly file-size before and after adding a motion study you can see why. The 'frames per second' you set in the properties has a huge effect, a motion study captured at 600 fps will take 20 times longer to save than the same study captured at 30fps.

[MJuric]

I do a lot of simulations. I've noticed that assemblies containing simulations/motion-studies always take waaay longer to save. If you check the assembly file-size before and after adding a motion study you can see why. The 'frames per second' you set in the properties has a huge effect, a motion study captured at 600 fps will take 20 times longer to save than the same study captured at 30fps.

I certainly get that some stuff just takes that long to chug thru. The irritating part is that there is no way to really know whether it is actually working and taking that long or if it's just plain broke.

I was actually doing a motion study, two minutes at 20 FPS, 2400 frames. I think I let it "Save" for 30 minutes or so before I decided I need to get to work. That's almost a second a frame which seems ridiculously long to me. At that rate a 2hr movie would take 60 hours to save

[Frederick_Law]

Usually the program is running fine.
But if you can't wait, stop it and run it overnight.

[MJuric]

Usually the program is running fine.
But if you can't wait, stop it and run it overnight.

unfortunately I ran it over the weekend...I couldn't wait for it to take seven hours to save after running it

I just wanted to add that something I've done in the past but failed to do this time was to just run two instances of SW. Run the simulation on one and "Work" on the other. I know this is not "Supported" or "Recommended" by SW but this way I could have run the simulation over the weekend, come in saved and the save could have taken as long as it needed while I worked in the other instance.

This tends to be a bit less stable than single instance, but I've done this ALOT and it works ~70% of the time....which really isn't much different than how often SW works anyway.

[JSculley]

I just wanted to add that something I've done in the past but failed to do this time was to just run two instances of SW. Run the simulation on one and "Work" on the other. I know this is not "Supported" or "Recommended" by SW but this way I could have run the simulation over the weekend, come in saved and the save could have taken as long as it needed while I worked in the other instance.

This tends to be a bit less stable than single instance, but I've done this ALOT and it works ~70% of the time....which really isn't much different than how often SW works anyway.

I often run simulations using SW running on a virtual machine. Complete isolation and I can assign as many cores as I want to the VM. So, a flow simulation can use 12 of my 16 cores, leaving me with 4 for other work.

[MJuric]

I often run simulations using SW running on a virtual machine. Complete isolation and I can assign as many cores as I want to the VM. So, a flow simulation can use 12 of my 16 cores, leaving me with 4 for other work.

What are you using to set up the virtual machine? That sounds like a really good idea.

[JSculley]

Hyper-V is included with Windows 10 ( except for the Home edition).

[MJuric]

Hyper-V is included with Windows 10 ( except for the Home edition).

Thanks, I'll look at that. If I can set up sims on VM and have them vomit without taking out SW on another machine that would be pretty nice. Also letting it chug away forever without it clogging up my screens would be nice as well.

Thanks

[jcapriotti]

That's why I think it would be uber nice if SW added a "XXX minutes until complete" like so many installation programs do. At least then you might have a very rough ball park of what it was supposed to take and whether it was actually making any progress or just spinning it's wheels.

Definitely need a dialogue that shows what step its on and what its doing. The newer file open dialogue is a step in the right direction with this. We also get this a little bit with the feature tree rebuilds where it shows what feature is being rebuilt. Would be nice to get an in feature status though.