In this paper multigrid smoothers of Vanka-type are studied in the
context of Computational Solid Mechanics (CSM). These smoothers were
originally developed to solve saddle-point systems arising in the
field of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), particularly for
incompressible flow problems. When treating (nearly) incompressible
solids, similar equation systems arise so that it is reasonable to
adopt the 'Vanka idea' for CSM. While there exist numerous
studies about Vanka smoothers in the CFD literature, only few
publications describe applications to solid mechanical problems.
With this paper we want to contribute to closing this gap. We depict
and compare four different Vanka-like smoothers, two of them are
oriented towards the stabilised equal-order $Q_1/Q_1$ finite element
pair. By means of different test configurations we assess how far
the smoothers are able to handle the numerical difficulties that
arise for nearly incompressible material and anisotropic meshes. On
the one hand, we show that the efficiency of all
Vanka-smoothers heavily depends on the proper parameter choice. On
the other hand, we demonstrate that only some of them are
able to robustly deal with more critical situations. Furthermore, we
illustrate how the enclosure of the multigrid scheme by an outer
Krylov space method influences the overall solver performance, and
we extend all our examinations to the nonlinear finite deformation
case.