Creo Simulate > Additional Information > Improving Performance > Managing RAM, Solram and Swap Space
  
Managing RAM, Solram and Swap Space
The biggest influences on performance are the amount of RAM in your machine and how that RAM is used by Creo Simulate.
The amount of memory that is used during an analysis includes the following factors:
complexity of the model
type of analysis or design study
desired accuracy of the solution
You can see how much total memory an analysis takes by looking for the following line at the bottom of the Summary tab of the Run Status dialog box:
Maximum Memory Usage (kilobytes): XXXX
All computers that run Creo Simulate use virtual memory, which allows programs to run on your computer as if it had more RAM than is actually available. Part of the virtual memory system is swap space, which is a specially formatted area of your disk, or a separate disk that the operating system can use while it is managing the real memory, or machine RAM, of your computer.
If the maximum memory usage of Creo Simulate plus the memory used by the OS and the other applications exceeds the amount of RAM in your machine, then the operating system (OS) will swap data between RAM and the hard disk, which seriously degrades the performance of your applications. Thus, 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 uses the most memory during an analysis. You can see how large the global stiffness matrix is by looking for the following line on the Checkpoints tab of the Run Status dialog box (also in the .pas file in the study directory):
Size of global matrix profile (mb):
You can limit the amount of memory that the global stiffness matrix will consume by setting the Memory allocation (MB) field in the Solver settings area of the Run Settings dialog box.
This memory allocation is called setting solver RAM or 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, then Creo Simulate will swap part of the matrix back and forth between disk and RAM using an specialized swapping algorithm that is more efficient than the general swapping algorithm used by the OS.
Creo Simulate runs most efficiently when the entire global stiffness matrix fits in solram and when the total memory used by Creo Simulate fits in RAM. The different possible memory usage scenarios are detailed in the topic ““Memory Usage — Different Scenarios”
Guidelines to Improve Performance
There are a few things to keep in mind when working with Creo Simulate:
If you use a 32-bit Window OS, 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.
Some guidelines that you can follow to improve performance.
1. Run on a machine with a 64-bit OS and lots of RAM.
2. Exit all other applications, so that Creo Simulate can use as much RAM as possible.
3. Set solram low enough so that the total memory used by Creo Simulate is less than your total amount of RAM.
4. If possible, set solram high enough so that the global stiffness matrix fits in solram (but don't violate guideline #3).