When does size matter? Export to SAT/STEP is taking very long

[Art V]

I'm trying to export a 3D model with just under 4,500 objects to SAT and STEP.

At first it would fail with memory issues and after stripping out al non-essential stuff and 2D items as texts etc. the file size went down from approx. 550 MB to 200 MB and it would still become unresponsive during export for an hour, so I force closed VW assuming it had crashed/frozen.

It finally worked after splitting the model up in multiple layers and then export each layer into SAT, however... it still took approx. two hours to get this done and I ended up with 2 GB of files.

The client would still prefer a single file with the entire model, so I'll try to let VW run the SAT export from a single layer overnight and hope for the best.

Though it does make me wonder about exporting to a STEP file, if SAT export is this bit of a hassle.

It seems to me that with only VW and the system and antivirus and other regular things running that 16GB of memory should be sufficient to create a 2GB output file, regardless of the VW file being 200 MB or 550MB.

Is there some size limit where export as a single model/file becomes a problem and I need to start splitting up into multiple layers or is it just a matter of having enough memory and time available?

If it is a matter of system memory, is there a general rule of thumb for how much GB of system memory would be advised for an certain complexity within VW? (Yes, the sky is the limit but I'd rather not load the system with additional e.g 32 GB or more RAM if that is not going be be used anyway by VW in this case)