Is there any help for MEMORY ERRORS in SS4?

That's one of several reasons my company has given up on SS4.
Memory errors made it almost impossible top process corridors, and the frequent hangs and crashes led to an unacceptable amount of corrupted files.
Our poor CAD manager was chasing those for months, and there never was any real solution found. We eventually decided to just roll all our projects back to SS2 so we could get our work done. The time lost doing that was more than made up by the time saved in actually being able to get the work done.

We have abandoned SS4 where-ever possible, and are using SS2 for all future work until our major client switches to OpenRoads Designer.

And I look like an idiot for wanting to be on the cutting edge for this project that began 20 months ago. I wish I had known.

SS4 is brutal. Hoping ORD is better. We all feel your pain. Good luck.

I'm not any kind of official expert on what Bentley does or why, but it seems like SS4 was, in some ways a dead-end package. It seems almost like it was just a test drive for the OpenRoads technology, and it ended up kind of a mish-mash of OR & Native product. The OR portion just doesn't seem to work all that well on 32 bit systems, so SS4 appears to have been left behind in the move to 64 bit.

The problem was, it was different enough from SS2 that it appeared to be a major update (in a way, it was). It "felt" like the way forward for Bentley's civil design software. Quite a few companies and clients jumped on board...but it's always been buggy. and the half & half approach between OR and native left a few things out and caused some confusion about what do design which way when.

The OpenRoads  and Connect were released and SS4 was just kind of dropped. There have been some updates and bug fixes, but I don't think it's going to be carried forward any more, and it's not likely to get a lot of Bentley resources invested in making all the improvements it really needs.

If you are going to stick with SS4, make sure that you do keep up on the updates that are being released.

We're sticking with SS2 in every way we can. We have a few clients who want certain deliverables in SS4, and we have some projects that we can't even draft without it (!!!!) but for the most part we've abandoned that effort. We're waiting until our major clients move to Connect and OpenRoads to make any further moves. And due to some backward incompatibility issues that my CAD manager says he's heard about, we won't update until our clients do.

I wish you the best of luck.

Keith

There are two things I recommend and these should be part of your standard operating procedure.

1. File management.  

Split your corridors into segments of not more than 1.5 miles long. You can do this now if needed. Just copy the dgn file with the long corridors and change the start and end stations. I’ve done this on many projects where the designer was unaware of this recommendation. The longest was a 10 mile long corridor which I copied 5 times and then changed station limits on each segment.

Keep terrain model files to less than 200-300 MB

Never use live nesting when referencing files.  Ok, never is probably too strong, but live nesting with depth > 1 can get you in trouble.

Be very careful when detaching ref files. Detach one which contains a referenced element causes huge instability.

2. Every time you leave your desk close and restart the product. This will clear any memory leaks. If you don’t leave your desk then restart the product every hour or two. 

Bonus #3 - get training for your entire staff. Teaching yourself is an invitation to disaster.

All: Ss4 is not a dead end. It was the 2nd giant step of a multi version migration to full OpenRoads designer. The evolutionary release schedule allowed designers to migrate in small steps rather than one giant leap. What you see in ss4 is a complete design package which relies on legacy plans production tools for sheeting and labeling.  OpenRoads designer is next giant step.  It is 95% identical to ss4 for design but adds new plans production tools and is of course 64 bit.

If you are expecting nirvana with ORD, you will likely be disappointed. This is not a disparagement of ORD, just a recognition of the fact that it is still OpenRoads and is still very complex software.  Does 64 bit help? Yes, especially with large files. Is it faster? No. File open times are horrendous. Otherwise feels about the same in real world projects.  Various sluggishness has been reported in these pages related to user interface interaction. Is it 100% stable. No. Is it the best bentley civil product yet?  Yes, it is and in my opinion better than the competition.  

Does it help an organization to skip ss4? No, not in my opinion. If you have waited this long then really all you have accomplished is that you now must learn Everything in one huge bite rather than an evolutionary process. In other words you now must climb a very steep learning curve in one go rather than a flatter learning curve stretched over time.