Setting up Performance Monitor to track Solidworks memory usage.

1) The first step is to launch performance monitor. You can browse through the menus Start\Programs\Control Panel\Admin Tools\Performance

2) You will see 3 items already in the list and its tracking these 3. Remove all of them. We do not need or want these trackers. Select each of them and click the “Delete” Key.

3) Now we can add our own tracker. Click the Plus sign at the top of the toolbar (marked with a red rectangle around it).

4) (NOTE: Solidworks must be running to finish this step) You will need to set up the counter to look like the one above except your computer name will differ. Pick the Performance object to be a process, then Select Virtual Bytes, and then select the “sldworks.exe”. Solidworks must already be running to select process.

5) You will see the counter looks like it is running at 100%. Well that’s not a % at all, that is indicating the amount of ram being used. So if you have 2 Gigabytes of RAM on your machine then you would want to have the chart show higher value than 2000. So in this example I am set the chart to read 3Gigs. To do this you need to RMB (right mouse click) the chart and select “properties” and then select the “Graph” Tab. Then change the Vertical scale Maximum to 3000 and click ok See Below.

6) Once you click OK you should see the chart change and list the amount of RAM being used by the application you chose, in this case its sldworks.exe.

7) Here you can see that sldworks.exe is only using 300 Megabytes per the 2 Gigs on the machine. You can also save this information out as a text or CSV file so others can view that track you setup

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