Drawings are super slow with xref's

[barshnizza812458]

We've always been a firm that maybe uses an xref here or there.
We usually xref our survey base file into our land development drawing and that's it.
We recently had an employee that was a huge advocate for xref's and he wanted to xref everything.
I have always noticed that the more xref's in a drawing, the worse that drawing runs.
We have some drawings that you cannot save unless you unload the existing conditions plan before saving. Otherwise, the drawing just loads forever and maybe crashes.
Our existing conditions base plans are purged, audited, and in some cases only have lines and text.
This is why we xref as little as possible.
Has anyone else ever had a problem like this??

[Opie]

We use XREFs to most base drawings in most of our sheet type drawings. We utilize the Overlay type XREF instead of the Attach type to reduce the likelihood of circular referencing. It also only brings in the initial XREF drawing and not any subsequent drawings that are XREFed within it.

[tedg]

We use XREFs to most base drawings in most of our sheet type drawings. We utilize the Overlay type XREF instead of the Attach type to reduce the likelihood of circular referencing. It also only brings in the initial XREF drawing and not any subsequent drawings that are XREFed within it.

Same here. We use TONS of xrefs with no problem at all. Our stuff is mostly buildings.
It may be the size of your xref files, you mentioned a "survey" file? is it a very big C3D file?
It may be your server or your computers too (I'm not a computer expert, but you need powerful machines and graphics cards, and good network/servers)

[rkmcswain]

Where are the files located?
We have hundreds of data shares, some of them not local to a particular office.
Use Process Monitor** to watch file/registry activity and see where the bottleneck is.
Corrupt drawings will also grind AutoCAD to a halt.

I see this all the time. ---> "Joe" is working on his parent drawing, and one day "Sally" edits a DWG that Joe has Xref'ed in, and it becomes corrupt. Joe comes in, opens his drawing and now it's slow or crashes, and he did nothing.
Xrefs are not bad by nature, they just require you to think about how AutoCAD still has to read the DWG and load it in the editor each time. Any bad stuff will rear its head.

** https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sy...nloads/procmon

[barshnizza812458]

Yeah. That was a thought I had too.
I have tried on a few jobs to go through the survey base file and purge the **** out of it.
The one job I literally started a brand new file from the autocad default template that gets put on your C drive (to see if our template file was the issue)
and copied only what I needed back into that file.
I exploded "smart" labels and got rid of the tin surfaces and the Land Development still cannot save unless the survey xref is unloaded first.
If you unload or detach the survey xref, the drawing runs just fine.
This happens with other xrefs too though. It's not just our survey files.
It looks like most, if not all of our xrefs are "attach". I'm going to try the overlay to see if that helps anything

[barshnizza812458]

Same here. We use TONS of xrefs with no problem at all. Our stuff is mostly buildings.
It may be the size of your xref files, you mentioned a "survey" file? is it a very big C3D file?
It may be your server or your computers too (I'm not a computer expert, but you need powerful machines and graphics cards, and good network/servers)

Yeah the files are not huge.
The one file I'm having an issue with, the survey file is 12 MB

I'd like to think our server is decent.
I don't know the exact specs, but we don't have any other issues.
We can run scan data or drone models just fine.

Our computers all have 11th gen i7 processors with RTX 3070 or better with 64 gig of ram

[rkmcswain]

Yeah the files are not huge.
The one file I'm having an issue with, the survey file is 12 MB

I'd like to think our server is decent.
I don't know the exact specs, but we don't have any other issues.
We can run scan data or drone models just fine.

Our computers all have 11th gen i7 processors with RTX 3070 or better with 64 gig of ram

Hardware is very rarely an issue. Can you post the 12MB survey drawing here?
If not have you run an Audit on it? Recovery?
Does it contain thousands of phantom parcels?
Regapps?

Does it look like it should be 12MB. That's not "large", but unless it has some big surfaces, why is it 12MB. That's a lot of feature lines and points.

[barshnizza812458]

Where are the files located?
We have hundreds of data shares, some of them not local to a particular office.
Use Process Monitor** to watch file/registry activity and see where the bottleneck is.
Corrupt drawings will also grind AutoCAD to a halt.

I see this all the time. ---> "Joe" is working on his parent drawing, and one day "Sally" edits a DWG that Joe has Xref'ed in, and it becomes corrupt. Joe comes in, opens his drawing and now it's slow or crashes, and he did nothing.
Xrefs are not bad by nature, they just require you to think about how AutoCAD still has to read the DWG and load it in the editor each time. Any bad stuff will rear its head.

** https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sy...nloads/procmon

Everything is located on the one server.
We do have a second office now, but this has been an issue since before the other office opened.
I honestly always thought this was normal until other newer employees started talking about how often they xref at their previous employers.
I was like "I'd go insane if we xreffed that much here. It would take 3 three times longer to do anything!"
But yeah, I don't know if it could be a server issue or where to look.
Like I said in another reply, we work with other software processing point clouds, scans, and drone models and have absolutely no issue with any of that.
It's just xrefs in cad

[barshnizza812458]

Hardware is very rarely an issue. Can you post the 12MB survey drawing here?
If not have you run an Audit on it? Recovery?
Does it contain thousands of phantom parcels?
Regapps?

Does it look like it should be 12MB. That's not "large", but unless it has some big surfaces, why is it 12MB. That's a lot of feature lines and points.

Yeah, that's usually the first thing I go to. Audit, Purge, Purgestyles, Recover.
The survey files do not typically contain the phantom parcels, though I know some of the Land development drawings contain parcels, extra sites, extra surfaces etc.
I'm not sure about the Reg apps. What is that? I'm not familiar with that one.

I will say that I have not yet had this issue on a land development drawing that I'm working on (I'm technically in the survey dept, but do work for both survey and design)
These issues are usually in a land development drawing that someone else in the company is working on.
When the survey file is unloaded, the drawing acts ok.
Maybe the issue isn't the survey file, but the land development drawing.....

[HeyPat]

The issue you're describing seems to be associated with your infrastructure. I've worked with massive models (over 100 MB) and scan files (200 GB RCP's) being XRef'd and experience very little lag, and this covers local files and server (including OneDrive) reference files.
So if the files aren't corrupt and nothing critical is reported during Audit then I'd suggest attempting to copy the server file to local and then test a one-to-one scenario: Open the file, XRef from server, check the time it takes and the performance, Close without Saving. Open the File, XRef from local disk, check the time it takes and the performance, Close without Saving. Compare the two results. If the file behaves the same from both then it's software based and may have something to do with settings or a bad install (unlikely).

I dunno, just spitballing a couple of possible solutions.