Trimble Business Center

I’ve been talking to my computer builder about a newer machine for TBC. I frequently reread the blog Alan posted mid November with some thoughts on “Buying a New PC to run TBC v5.” From what I read the consensus was more RAM would speed things up on larger jobs. I currently have two Windows 10 Pro computers I use. Both have SSD for storage and i7 CPUs. One is a three year old desktop with 16GB of RAM and the other is a newer Dell Precision mobile workstation with 32GB. I setup both to process the same DWG file with over 90,000 exploded objects. There is nothing else of consequence running in the background. I’m using the graphical part of Task Manager to observe the resources being used. While running Data Prep the 16GB computer uses 3.4-3.7GB and the 32GB uses 5.1-5.2GB. My computer builder said there is diminished benefits to increasing memory. In this case having double the memory only added another 50%.

During the processing the CPU would occasionally max out one or two of the cores. At other phases of Data Prep most of the cores would be in use. 

They both have different GPUs that when closely observing  a surface in 3D view would use 100% for a brief period.

I’ve decided to use an i7-9700K start out with 16GB of fast DDR4 3000 RAM, a fast SSD and an RTX2060 video card when they come out in a few weeks.

Has anyone observed how much RAM their computers are actually using during processing?

I think this is along the lines of what you are asking about: Speed up takeoff Report.

I feel like I have some resources left on the table especially when running the takeoff report. 

I don't know about TBC specifically, but in my experience with software having faster RAM generally works better.

I have friends in media production who swear by having 32/64GB of RAM but they generally have multiple instances of videos and hi-def frames open at any given time.

I have always found smaller faster RAM to be preferable over quantity. Especially if you are not multitasking.

My current work laptop functions well, I have sites with over 500 separate surfaces for residential plots and roads and it works well.

It has 16GB 2400 SODIMM, a 1060 and an i7-7700HQ

I have done a fair bit of research on this specific topic but I am in no way a hardware expert.  What I have been able to determine is that certain commands in TBC temporarily use large amounts of RAM.  Primarily in my use, the takeoff report can use massive amounts of RAM.  I have a moderate to large site I did a takeoff report on and while it is running I keep an eye on the task manager.  The amount of RAM in use builds up while the command is running, on a very fast computer it takes about 3 minutes to complete the report and just before it completes the total memory used was up to 45 GB.  I have 64 GB of RAM so there was no big slow down, however if you have less RAM than required it will start to use virtual RAM which is located on your hard drive and massively slower.  So my advice is to keep your task manager open while working and see what it maxes out at during various tasks and spec out your system based on that.  I don't do a ton of point cloud work but it seems that the biggest users of RAM are not point clouds but anything that computes volumes.

As others have said, other than that all you can do is get the fastest RAM and fastest hard drive (definitely get a solid state hard drive) and the fastest processor.  Number of cores is pretty much irrelevant because TBC can only run on one core so get the highest GHz processor you can get and don't be concerned with number of cores (although I wouldn't get anything less than quad core so your other stuff can run smoothly too).  The only other thing that can help is overclocking your processor.  I would only recommend that if you are comfortable with it, and if you are, then of course you know the importance of very frequent data backups due to the instability issues with overclocking, but once you get past that you can easily get to 5 GHz with a current generation Core i9.

I don't know if it is in the plan, or if its even possible, but if TBC is ever able to run on multiple threads/cores then I think we should see a pretty drastic increase in speed utilizing some of the hyperthreaded processors coming out with over a thousand cores.

Just to add my 2c worth in to this because ive been looking at this as well. I use point cloud data a fair bit for earthworks with some LAS files around the 1Gb size and TBC has a built in limit to use half the ram the computer has availiable, now i dont know if this limit is applied to other aspects of the program.

Another factor to consider is generally when i work i have Chrome open for earthworks reports, online doc control for the project etc and pdf software as well which are both ram hungry programs so they are all competing for the their slice of availiable ram.

I read somewhere as well that once memory devices get to 80% utilisation that they start to slow down after that because they have to handle large volume of data (coupled with windows 10 issues with standby memory it wont release) lower ram computers can start to bog down pretty quickly from my experience.