Working with huge projects

[mairomaster]

Hello!

I am currently starting working on a project, which is an expanded version of an older project. The project will contain a multi-channel design with 18 repeat blocks. Each of the blocks is pretty complex and I expect the total number of components to be well over 10,000.

I am worried that I might have problems with Altium running out of system resources (RAM) when working on the PCB. My computer is pretty good, but Altium is limited by its 32 bit architecture.

Have you worked on such big projects and did you experience any difficulties? Any helpful tips?

Thanks

[T3sl4co1l]

It crashes enough for me, working on a project with ~1000.. though it seems more like random shit rather than project scaling.  PCB view is probably going to be slow with everything on there.  I don't think components and stuff really consume all that much memory, compared to the baseline, but it's hard to say.

The only probable RAM-related crashes I've had are trying to generate outputs with virtual memory use at or above 1.1GB, and very long simulations with full node saving that chew through gigs and actually exhaust the >3GB available.

As for the project itself, would it not be cheaper and faster to build one board, 18 times, and connect them to a main board with headers?

Tim

[DerekG]

I am worried that I might have problems with Altium running out of system resources (RAM) when working on the PCB. My computer is pretty good, but Altium is limited by its 32 bit architecture.

Any helpful tips?

Altium's recommended hardware requirements can be found here:

https://techdocs.altium.com/display/ADOH/System+Requirements

Make sure you run a video card with a minimum of 1GB memory, preferably 2GB so that the 3GB RAM hard limit that Altium can address is kept as free as possible.

Open as few files/pcbs etc within Altium as possible to help conserve RAM.

Add all your library components into your own project library file so that you don't have a dozen/two dozen/three dozen Altium libraries open as these will consume up your RAM fairly quickly.

Following the above recommendations should allow your quite fast motherboard to handle 5000+ components.

[mairomaster]

Thank you for the tips.

Regarding building 1 board 18 times - the design is such that this is not really suitable for different reasons. There are complex high-speed connections running between the channels. Having everything on 1 big board improves the signal integrity and makes it easier/more reliable to assembly the product.

Fortunately, I don't need to use any component libraries since we have a Altium component vault.

[andre_teprom]

though it seems more like random shit rather than project scaling. 

An 'efficient' way to detect if the project is near to crash, is by observing the size of the project file, so that a significant increase is an indication of oncoming problem, so in order to turn around is by creating a new project, manually copying everything from origina project to there.

[mairomaster]

though it seems more like random shit rather than project scaling. 

An 'efficient' way to detect if the project is near to crash, is by observing the size of the project file, so that a significant increase is an indication of oncoming problem, so in order to turn around is by creating a new project, manually copying everything from origina project to there.

Do you know what would be a regular file size and when is it getting too big? And if you transfer all files to a new project, without the project file, how do you transfer all the data contained in the project file?

[T3sl4co1l]

FWIW, I see .PrjPcb files from 37k to 144k.

I haven't noticed projects getting unstable due to size creep, at least not from the scales I've worked on.

Tim

[Zman]

I remember that one of my projects had around 1000 LEDs on a single PCB and it was regularly crashing after some actions. I had w7 x64 machine with 16Gb RAM which looked like "more than enough for everyone"

So I sent a request to the Altium tech support together with files...
The reply was - you have too many components, don't do this :-)
So I had to split the design somehow (do not remember all the details) and it worked for me.

However, that was a while ago and the AD version was probably 14 or below. The software is written with Delphi and is "memory-hungry". Earlier Delphi compilers had limited support for x64 systems so that could be the reason - don't know...

The bottom line is - I expect that latest versions of AD should be better in memory handling on x64.