I have a 3D mesh which i read into Fluent. it takes about 10 to 15 minutes for it to be completely read.

There are approximately 1.7 million hex cells in the mesh. Is this the reason for the excessive reading time?

Is there some way to reduce the file size without increasing the mesh size?

Thanks

are you reading that in the serial solver?Well...to me it's a huge task to be accomplished. Try using the parallel solver. The time will be less. Moreover you can reduce the file size by naming your case and data file appending .gz Luca

if you are on a single processor version and then fluent is taking this much time then its really strange, on my windows machine fluent reads a case with around 2 million cells in less than 5 minutes. but however if you read the same file in fluent parallel version it might take lot of time reading it (sometimes), to avoid this, you should do the manual partition in single processor and then read the case/data files in parallel version, then it takes almost same time as single processor version.

yes but it depends on how much memory you have. Luca