Annotative objects cause file save delay

[BlackBox]

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I have to work on the C drive because the network is too slow. A save could take a half hour, and we have a fiber network with 10gb speed.
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To help you appreciate what you've got:

My workstation runs at +/-20,657 MB/s (yes, big "B"), our server runs at +/- 40 Gb/s (12x of 32x drive bays filled in RAID 10, so faster with each pair added)... over a 1Gb network switch bottlenecking them... been asking for 10Gb network for years.

[Ed Jobe]

It could be 1GB, I can't remember. Regardless, I have to store files locally. Then I check them into the dms. For backup protection, I use Windows backup to copy my work area to another SSD.

[dkennard]

Yep, my save time improves a little but not significantly if I copy the files to my C: drive. I've opened a call with AutoDESK support and I'm working with them to replicate the issue, all the testing I'm doing is with files stored on the C: drive, to exclude the network from the possible causes. I cant think of a reason why saving my current drawing should not take longer if an attached XREF contains annotative blocks.

It makes me curious. What is AutoCAD actually doing during a save operation? In my over simplified view I'd assumed part of the benefit of the XREF was that, as far as my current drawing is concerned an XREF is just an insert point and scale the actual content of the reference does not matter, which is clearly not the case.

[Ed Jobe]

Yes, you are correct that the data for the xref is in drawing2.dwg. Each dwg file is a database. The only info that the parent dwg needs is the filename, insertion point, scale and rotation. It's possible though, that the parent file may need to store info regarding the annotative scale of the xref. With this plugin, you can inspect dwg objects.

[dkennard]

I did a bit of testing to try and capture exactly how long the save time is and what the difference is between annotative and non-annotative.
The test sets I used consisted of multiple versions of File_X with 1 to 3000 copies of the ANNO_TEST block, with and without the Annotative property set to yes.
The average QSAVE time of File_A for the non-annotative versions of File_X = 151ms, and 21765ms (~22 seconds) for the annotative version of File_X.

Graphed QSAVE times
annotative_vs_nonannotative_augi_1024x811.png

[dkennard]

I raised a support call with AutoDESK for this. The fix is to set the system variable SAVEFIDELITY to 0
The SAVEFIDELITY help page does not state what the default value is, so I'm not sure if I've set it to 1 or it's an out of the box default value.

[BlackBox]

SYSVDLG Command is your friend.