The verdict on 2009 ‘reliability, scalability and performance’
So the real question with 2009 is did it deliver on Jeff Ray’s stated goals of ‘reliability, scalability and performance’? I started early with 2009. I actually used 2009 Alpha for a production project. Bad idea, but I wanted to try out in particular the enhancements in the Freeform feature, which helped me complete the project. To be sure, Alpha crashed a lot, but it’s Alpha, you (or I anyway) expect that.
Reliability
Scalability
One of the great things about corporate buzzwords is that they sound highly technical but aren’t specific enough to actually tie you down to any real results. The buzzword Scalability has been tortured to mean anything from installation to performance. Since Performance is the third category, let’s just say Scalability means the ability to install more seats.
Due only to the total misfunction of the Installation Manager, 2009, like its predecessors, gets a resounding F. The IM failed every time I used it. On the bright side, it always had creative and entertaining reasons for failing. Still, this is not enough. It should just work.
Performance
There are different kinds of performance. For many people assembly performance is what really counts. For that, I give 2009 a B+. The SpeedPak deal is useful, or at least is seems so to me. It will require an understanding of its strengths and weaknesses to use it well, but I think it’s a great tool.
Part performance is the type of performance that I’m most concerned with. This isn’t going to see a big boost. There are a lot of things they could do to help us out in this direction, but that’s another blog post. For part performance, I give a C.
Overall
Overall, I’d have to give a B-. The fact that they mostly recovered from a disasterous 2008 release is definite points in favor, but the down side is that if they are listening to customers, they have some serious distortion circuitry in there somewhere (magnifying glass, colors/appearances, sketch dimensions, custom properties interface builder, documentation, etc.)
I let my subscription lapse due to the high rate of crashes of the first 3 updates of SW2007. SW2008 seems to be much worse than SW2007. Can you compare the reliability of SW2009 to SW2007.
Does it still twist lofts of convex shapes in to self intersecting solids? I can of course add copious guide curves to tame the loft. Do shell features still fail when they sould succeed? Does the display sometimes freeze while Solidworks runs the processor at 100% speed for no reason? Are there any improvments with fillets? What does you crystal ball suggest about the number of service packs required before it will actually work?
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Rick,
I don’t find 2007, 2008 or 2009 to be very crashy at all. I crashed a lot with 2009 Alpha, but not much with beta. I would guess that your crash issue is a local installation, add-in, driver or hardware situation.
Lofts will some times resist manipulation with connectors. I can usually find a way around those problems, though.
I have good luck with shells. Use Tools, Check or Verification on Rebuild to find the source of the problem.
SW tends to do some extra processing at the end of a rebuild that I assume is doing backup/recover type stuff, saving body data or updating previews. I really don’t know what it’s doing. Rebuilds take a bit longer than they used to.
Improvements with fillets? Honestly, that’s a pretty solid area of the software.
I’m going to have to start using it at SP0, although I don’t recommend that. Check it out at SP1 and see what you think.