Papa’s Best STL Viewer is the fastest STL viewer and needs little RAM. I wrote it specifically because MeshLab & Co are too slow. Compare the performance of various STL viewers loading this 116 MB STL:

Benchmark Details

Core i7 860 with 8 GB of RAM; AMD Radeon HD 5700; Windows 7 x64.

Programs were run thrice; the best numbers were recorded.

Loading time begins with launching the program with the file as parameter, and ends with the first UI response to user input.

Memory demand is the peak working set during loading time.

One second has been subtracted from MeshLab’s loading time for manually closing the remove duplicate vertices prompt.

MeshBrowser’s loading time begins with opening the file instead of launching the program.