A cache is a portion of system memory. You can choose to store analysis results in a cache during postprocessing to speed up the generation of images on the screen. When results are cached, ABAQUS/CAE can plot results without recomputing values for display or accessing the output database file as often. This can greatly improve performance. However, caching results will increase memory usage. If you find that ABAQUS/CAE is consuming a lot of memory on your workstation and consequently hindering the performance of your system, you can disable the results caching options to erase the memory associated with results caches. Clearing this memory can increase overall performance; however, the display of results will be slower. Switching to a new output variable or output database will automatically clear the current results cache. For more information, see “Controlling results caching,” Section 24.5.10.

ABAQUS/CAE can display data from an output database while an analysis job is still running and while the database continues to be updated. After most Visualization module operations and during animations, ABAQUS/CAE monitors the output database for updated results and updates the current viewport accordingly. If you are displaying data from a remote output database, the performance of ABAQUS/CAE may be degraded if the time taken to monitor the database over the network is significant. To increase the performance, you can reduce the frequency with which ABAQUS/CAE monitors the output database for updates, or you can disable the monitoring. For more information, see “Accessing an output database on a remote computer,” Section 9.3.