Performance improvements in SOLIDWORKS PDM 2023, 2024, 2025

With every year’s What’s New in SOLIDWORKS, also comes along its multi-products, e.g. What’s New in SOLIDWORKS PDM. This blog will cover a number of performance related improvements in three recent releases of SOLIDWORKS PDM (v2025, v2024, v2023).

SOLIDWORKS PDM is a document management product based on client/server architecture. Do note that SOLIDWORKS PDM has two offerings, PDM Standard and PDM Professional.

Do consider an upgrade of your eco-system with your SOLIDWORKS and PDM administrator if you’re still working with an older version of SOLIDWORKS PDM to benefit from the latest enhancements.

SOLIDWORKS PDM v2023

The v2023 release (SOLIDWORKS PDM 2023 SP4 onwards) focused on improving performance for users with high network latency to their PDM servers. Significant performance gains can be expected, especially in high latency environment. Improvements might vary based on the latency, dataset size, and operation.

High Latency to Database Server, better performances for:

• Check-ins, check-ins with automatic transition.
• Undo Check-outs.
• Interactive operations with menus, reference dialogs, PDM File Explorer tabs.

High Latency to Archive Server, expect better performances for:

• Add files.
• Change state on file modifications.
• Get files, Get latest version of files.

The mechanism for loading SOLIDWORKS PDM and custom add-ins was also reworked, leading to significantly faster operations when logging in to a vault and starting the SOLIDWORKS PDM Search tool.

SOLIDWORKS PDM v2024

The v2024 release delivers overall faster performance for a few file-based operations than previous. These gains are focused on boosting user efficiency and reducing waiting times.

Expect 2x times faster speed when performing the following operations:

• Add files
• Change state
• Copy Tree
  (With the compressed archive operation seeing even more substantial speed gains.)

SOLIDWORKS PDM 2024 (SP1 onwards) also offers visual improvements with the progress dialog box of certain operations being modernised and updated and displaying more information as well.

The Check-In and Reading File References progress dialog boxes shows a progress bar that displays the current action and file names.

While the Change State and Copy Tree progress dialog boxes show two progress bars:

• The first progress bar has the primary steps or actions of the overall operation, such as Copying Files and Copying Variables.
• The second progress bar has detailed information such as secondary steps, total number of files, etc.

SOLIDWORKS PDM v2025

Performance-wise, the v2025 release improved file check-in times to the SOLIDWORKS PDM database.

You can expect your file Check in operations to be 2x times faster than before.

If you have any queries, you can contact us at support@seacadtech.com