Why Does SOLIDWORKS Show the “Running Critically Low” Warning and How Do You Fix It?

 Troubleshooting SOLIDWORKS is Running Critically Low Warning

Question:

In the SOLIDWORKS Resource Monitor or SOLIDWORKS, why do I see the warnings: ‘Available open document capacity is low’, ‘Available open document capacity is critically low’, and ‘WARNING! SOLIDWORKS is running critically’?

  

Answer:

SOLIDWORKS monitors your entire computer system resource usage in real time while SOLIDWORKS is running.

Resources that SOLIDWORKS monitors include Windows® Graphical Device Interface (GDI) objects.

Windows GDI is an application programming interface (API) used for representing graphical objects and displaying them on your external displays within the Windows operating system (OS).

The Windows OS limits the maximum number of GDI objects available for each process. Each OS allows 10,000 GDI objects for each process.

Once any process nears the 10,000 GDI Object limit, the process can become unstable and you may not be able to interact with the user interface.

SOLIDWORKS uses Windows GDI to display elements within the SOLIDWORKS user interface.

SOLIDWORKS consumes additional GDI objects for each document you open. SOLIDWORKS add-ins may also use Windows GDI to display user interface elements within SOLIDWORKS, which also contributes to the consumption of GDI objects against the SOLIDWORKS process.

In many cases, GDI objects limit the number of document windows you can have open at one time in SOLIDWORKS.

SOLIDWORKS monitors the GDI object usage for the SOLIDWORKS process and displays a series of warnings starting at 85% of the GDI object per process limit.

When you see these warnings there are recommendations you may follow to manage the situation.

Troubleshooting Steps:

Stage 1:  Follow these steps to verify the GDI objects are open against the SOLIDWORKS process:

1.       Press Ctrl + Alt + Delete and start the Windows ‘Task Manager’.

2.       To view the ‘Processes’ tab, click the ‘Details’ tab.

a.       Add the ‘GDI objects’ column to the view, right-click on a column header > ‘Select columns’ > select the ‘GDI Objects’ option > ‘OK’.

3.       In the list of processes, locate the ‘sldworks.exe’ process and make note of the value in the ‘GDI objects’ column.

For the default environment, if the GDI objects value for ‘sldworks.exe’ is 8500 or more, SOLIDWORKS will begin to notify you with warnings.

Stage 2:

Second, follow these steps to determine if you have 30 or more document windows open, and close documents that are not necessary at the moment:

1.       Click on the ‘File Explorer’ task pane tab.

2.       Click on the arrow icon next to ‘Open in SOLIDWORKS’.

3.      Look for documents that contain a solid icon. These are documents open in their own document window.

4.    Identify and close documents that do not need to be open in their own document window.

If you have a SOLIDWORKS Usage that requires at least 30 or more document windows open at the same time in SOLIDWORKS, you have an option to increase the GDI object per process limit within the OS.

For information about the registry key responsible for the GDI object per process setting, see the Microsoft article at:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms724291(v=vs.85).aspx

The default decimal value is 10000.

To satisfy your requirements, please consider incremental changes to the ‘GDIProcessHandleQuota’ registry value.

CAUTION: Incorrectly editing the registry can severely damage your operating system. The SOLIDWORKS Technical Support team strongly suggests that you back up the registry data before making any changes to the registry.

If you need a value of more than 24000, then you should closely evaluate your workflow. It is possible that the GDI objects are not being handled correctly in your environment.

As the limit for GDI increases, you may also need to increase the “user object” limit within the OS, otherwise you may encounter the per-process OS limit for User objects and experience unstable behavior when the GDI limit increases beyond 10,000 objects. Each OS allows 10,000 User objects for each process by default.

For information about the registry key responsible for the user object limit, see the Microsoft article at:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms725486(v=vs.85).aspx

The default decimal value is 10000. The maximum possible value is 18000.

As a general rule of thumb, consider setting the user object limit to as 75% of the GDI object limit.

For example, if you increase the GDI object limit to 16000, consider raising the user object limit to 12000.

The registry entry for both is within these two locations:

ü[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Windows

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Windows]