A significant improvement in execution time (especially for smaller models) may be obtained by chosing element type and real reference numbers that start at unity and avoid large jumps in value, this avoids unnecessary result file access.
The ANSYS program outputs element-wise results only at nodes or integration points at the vertices of an element, for higher order elements FEMVIEW requires results for mid-side nodes or integration points. The default is to interpolate the results, however a slight speed increase of the interface program is possible by averaging these results - with a slight loss in accuracy. This is achieved by appending `-midside_av' to the executable name.
Nodal averaging of element-wise results is performed in core if possible, if the results exceed the array limits then paging to a temporary file will automatically occur resulting in a time penalty in program execution. This may be avoided by increasing the size of the in core array DVECT in the main program.