HFSS Animation Generation Time is Unreasonable

[kzeller]

Hello,

I'm using HFSS to observe E fields in a simple microwave resonant cavity and experiencing problems generating animations. These are simple 3 plane views of the magnitude of the E field.

After a job is complete a single plot will display in a matter of seconds. However just loading the animation tool will take ~5 minutes, then clicking the "new" button will take another few minutes to load.

Finally generating and compiling 15 plots into an animation will take about 20 minutes which seems unreasonable given the amount of time it takes to generate a single plot.

Is there a way to generate plots in parallel using multiple cores? Running a job with 16 cores is relatively simple and doesn't take long. But the animation generator only uses one core which has been ridiculously slow.

Perhaps there is another way to get around this issue?

Thank you

 

[kzeller]

Update:
This doesn't make sense, when I run a single simulation (Eigenmode, 2 modes and a single geometry) it will take seconds to display the single field after the sim is complete. When a parameter sweep is performed and I have 1000 different geometries it will take 10 minutes to generate the same single field!

Both of these are using the "automatic" setting for updating post-processing information in which plots are updated at the end of each pass.

Why would having many geometries impact the generation of a single field report?

 

[PlanarMetamaterials]

There are some issues with the new version of HFSS, I think this is one of them. There's unfortunately not a workaround that I'm aware of.

 

[dick_freebird]

Once you overrun RAM and get into VM, things go bad
abruptly and big time. Take a look at RAM and VM
utilization in the performance monitor of your choice.

I don't really understand why the complaint, given
that from the sound of it, 1000X the geometries is
taking 600X the "wall time" (give or take). The "same
single field" is irrelevant; your CPU is counting cows,
not pastures.

 

[kzeller]

I figured out several solutions to alleviate the problem: going into tools>options>General options>General>dynamically update post processing data for new solutions>immediately. This lets HFSS generate plot data during simulation time I believe.
Also in the same options window specifying the number of processors to use for pre/post processing will speed things up if you have 32 cores like I do.

The biggest speed improvement came when I rebuilt my model... complex cloning, geometry boolean operations etc was significantly slowing it down. Plus some edges that didn't quite match up.

Also limiting the parametrics to maybe 20 or 30 variations speeds things up.