opening drawings in abs 2006

[fassino_david]

Does anyone know how to get 3d drawings in 2006 to open faster?

[RobertB]

Faster computers.

[Steve_Bennett]

Quad chip system with dual core, 10,000rpm hard drive & maximum ram (if the file is on a network - faster network).

Oh. You're thinking the software can work faster? If you have complex files - they will always take a while to open. You can try to speed up the time it takes to open a file by running a purge on it prior to saving & closing the file.

[alaexus]

I guess the programmers have not thought about present day computers (or people) when they designed ABS2006. Hard to open, hard to close, hard to regen, very big files, incompatibility with autocad (no matter what version!). This is a nightmare program. Maybe our children with their computers will be able to work on this program. Until then, it's a big waste of money and time. Sorry guys, but I have an entire design department which curses this application. You have to optimize it (a little bit more of assembler will not hurt anyone!!).
A

[Mustangman6799]

Faster computers.


So, we have fairly fast computers. But this brings up a good topic of conversation. What is the "ideal" build for a CAD station? We custom build our machines. My machine is as follows. ASUS A8n-SLI Deluxe motherboard, Two Western Digital 7200 (or 7400 not sure which) 80 GB hard drives striped, raid-0. Dual video cards (ATI x1900x256X 2) and a 2GB of matched mushkin ram (pc 5500 I believe) 500 w power supply AMD Athalon 64 x2 dual core 4800+. Most of the time I don't have any problems opening any drawings but there are two sets of drawings that we have a really really really hard time with.

This is the point of this post by the way.

We have a drawing that we get from one of our subcontractors. They are using ABS 2006 as are we. The file takes in excess of 30 minutes just to open. And don't even think about trying to zoom extents; there goes another 30 minutes, if it is able to complete. The same goes for switching to paperspace and tabs that are set up in the drawing. The drawing is only about 26 meg but is horrible to work with. I have gone to the extent of setting up a drawing that contains nothing but all of the title blocks that we are going to use trying to xref all of the different components in to build the drawing that I need to build. X-ref the backgrounds, structural, walls, grids, etc- but this is still not alleviating the issues that we are having.

We have several different relatively high performance machines here at the office but none of them are able to work with any sort of fluidity on this drawing. Another drawing that we have is our "Onion Skins" drawing. This drawing is a snapshot of every wall of every room containing every detail from switch locations, columns, pipe chases, pipe, conduit, casework, misc. other equipment etc, etc in both 2 and 3-d including dimensions and notes. This file is just huge (at one point before we broke it out into multiple drawings it had reached 100 meg. Of course we do audits (which can take up wards of 30 minutes) and purges. Visualaudits are also common.

I guess my question is this; Countless hours have been wasted waiting for CAD to do something. Anything. Even failing would be preferable to sitting for hours and waiting... How do you get a large drawing like these to open and make it so you are able to work with it? Is the key in the machine? Do we need to build a different style of computer? What is suggested as the ideal machine? We are working from a server but that doesn't make any difference. If you copy the drawing to your hard drive before you try and open it, we still have the same issue.

I would love to post the drawing but it is "classified" (neat huh) so I can only hope someone out there will be able to suggest something that we are overlooking.

[Steve_Bennett]

Bigger programs + bigger files = slow headaches (http://2d-or-not-2d.blogspot.com/2006/10/bigger-programs-bigger-files-slow.html)

[david_peterson]

You should also notice that files will open faster and be of a smaller size if you save them in a plan view as opposed to a 3d view.

[Mustangman6799]

Both good points. I have noticed that saving in plan view does help, we have tried to make that our standard practice. Also, avoid using shaded modes, they are very hungry. I'm surprised that there wasn't more response to this e-mail. I would think that computer builds would be a hot topic here on Augi.

[david_peterson]

Well if hardware is what you are looking for, you could try snooping around the hardware forum. As ACA and Acad run on the same platform, we don't get our own unique hardware forum. But we are more than willing to try and help get what you have to run faster. Hope this helps.