X-Ref Drawings take long time to open

[Anonymous]

We have a particular drawing that contains x-refs that the users are complaining is taking 2 to 3 minutes to open.

We are using LT 2008, being a newbie to CAD, I have no idea what I should be looking for.

Everything on the network seems to be run fine.

Any ideas appreciated

[Anonymous]

Number of Xrefs and the complexity of each Xref can slow opening times.
Since you describe the problem as "...a particular drawing..." you might
want to investigate to see what makes this one (and it's Xrefs) unique from
other drawings.

--
Dean Saadallah
http://LTisACAD.blogspot.com
--

[Anonymous]

Not really know where to start to be honest. I don't know what I am looking for in terms of x-refs etc

[scottbolton]

Type XR to open the xref manager - better yet, get a CAD user to do it. See which xrefs are being used. Are any of them particularly large? In Windows Explorer copy all the used xrefs and the drawing to a local drive. Re-path the xrefs to use the local files. Save and close. Re-open the file - is it still slow? If none of the xrefs are particularly large then detach one, SAVEAS and close. Now re-open and observe the time taken. Repeat this for each xref to see if any one file is causing the slow-down.

We're currently using drawings that have 10Mb xrefs located on a server 250 miles away - it's often quicker to walk to the office and get the drawing manually.

If you're using full AutoCAD you could look into PARTIALOPEN.

S

[Anonymous]

The x-ref in question is only 3 meg, is that classed as a large file?

[scottbolton]

Not really, but it depends what your network (or more usually, notwork) is like. Try storing them locally and seeing if the problem persists.

I'm looking into scale lists at the moment to see if it will improve our own slow opening times.

S

[MariuszPL]

you should be able to fix the problem with this tool:
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/item?siteID=123112&id=11062617&linkID=9240618
scale lists in 2008 and 2009 may cause serious delays in drawings that containx x-refs