autocad crashing / hanging & operating very sluggishly

[Anonymous]

Autocad slow / crashing.  Noticed that certain lines in a complex masterplan drawing seem to trigger the program going slow /  after half an hour requiring a forced shut down ... because nothing is happening after 20 minutes & more of waiting.  but leving it over an hour for lunch sometimes has the "thinking" resolved withe the computer waiting for the next command. 

The lines in question seem to have a flying blue flag.  I have used the parametrics tray & used the appropriate flag x on a selected problem line ... sometimes it works ... sometimes the dwg goes into a thinking mode that never resolves, forcing a shut down. 

the drawings also seem to assume huge file sized.  I have tried to reduce the size by having only a few small dwgs in a folder at a time ... but the size still appears big ... out of proportion to what is drawn in the file.  Purging & auditing is being done.  On a few occasions auditing a dwg has made it go into a long "thinking" mode ... ultimately requiring a forced shut down via the task manager

HELP someone 🙂

[Charles_Shade]

The Blue Flag is an indication that Constraints have been used.

Someone may have AUTOCONSTAINed entities in the Drawing file if you are unaware of these.

DELCONSTRAINT can be used to remove the Constraints if need be.

Does this file have many Dymanic or Parametric Blocks in it?

Lots of Hatching perhaps?

How about some computer and system specs as weel as your Version of CAD too please.

[Anonymous]

How big of a file are you talking here? Any XREFS? If you have google chrome installed on your computer I suggest uninstalling it, for some reason it makes Autocad and other design software go haywire.

[troma]

Can you expand on your knowledge of the interaction between Chrome & AutoCAD? I haven't experienced a problem so far. Thanks.

[Anonymous]

Im not savvy with programming and such, but the IT guy at my school told me that was why my CAD and Revit always crashed... not sure what it is about it. But now that im in an office I uninstalled it from my work comp and run CAD and Bentley Inroads without many problems. I suggested it to all the other engineers and cad techs and they have all seen an improvement aswell. Ive also found that only having having 1 sheet layout per file makes a dramatic difference when it comes to crashing and issues. We just use master files for our design work and then xref the master file into each sheet file and freeze/unfreeze what we need per sheet. If you xref jpegs or large files always unload them before saving and closing and your program and file will open and run smoother aswell. There are lots of tricks to operate Cad with minor crashing incidents, most of which is just learning through experience. Most people click too much with thier mouse, and that will also cause problems. Having more than 2 or 3 cad windows open, having large areas/many areas with hatching, etc. Hope some of these help if you didnt already know about them.

[Anonymous]

Thank you. There were auto constrains on some random lines & on hatch blocks in the overall drawings
Yes there was a lot of hatching as it was a large site plan with hatching denoting various items
Just selecting one such line would send the computer into a 30 minute "not responding" phase then it would select ... I then tried to select these affected line & de-constrain them using the Parametric tools - namely with the "x" on the flag pictogram
With the dwg fully loaded, no hatches deleted (just frozen), the process would take hours to act on each command.

By the way what would you say if someone told you that using xrefs was "old fashioned"? We are only allowed to use blocks here
In the past I have had big files but none gave me this trouble with the "flying blue flag" which has turned up in the last two projects I have been working on

To get back to the point - I had a number of drawings on a single window.

1 I broke the dwg set into a number of separate drawing to bring the folder down in size
2 I then deleted all unwanted dwgs lines / hatches in model space that were no longer required for the downsized dwg sets
3 The time for selecting the constrained items were quicker, as was the time to de-constraining them using the parametric tools
4 With each de-constraining the system got quicker, until the last few lines requiring de-constraining were quite quick as per normal workings
5 In this manner I am back to working & times have returned to normal so that the drawing may be worked upon

OBSERVATIONS:
A Where did these "flying blue flags" come from I ask myself???
B Now that the files which I have made very much smaller, they still show up a large files like a simple file = 16MB
B The only "outside" file is a survey file in the dwg series is one from our surveyor (3D, but since flattened & purged) - I have checked this survey file for lines with constrains but there are none
C So the constrain files have been introduced in our office, onto some random dwg lines, at random places in the dwg set
D Could this be interpreted as sabotage in your opinion, to make the files unwieldy & therefore work performance slow?

The computer parameters I use:
Windows 7 Professional
Service Pack-1
Processor: Intel(R) CPU E5-2650 0 @ 2.00 GHz 2.80GHz
RAM: 16 GB
System type: 64 bit operating system

Any further thoughts would be appreciated ... & thank you again

[Bob_Zurunkle]

OP have you tried (as a separate test) writing the entire drawing off as a block?

[Anonymous]

I would say your probably right. Xrefs have thier ups and downs, what i like about them though is the ability to unload them until needed and easier placement into the coordinate system. Im in the trasportation group at CH2M hill so we use master files for existing-site, proposed-site, topo, and titleblock... once xrefed in you have the ability to turn layers on and off... "NCOPY", "XLIST etc. It may be old fashioned but thats the way we do it company wide in the transportation group, atleast to my knowledge. We are also still running autocad 2011 which kind of sucks as 2012/2013 had a few great commands added such as PathArray among others. A 16mb file is rather large, and i suspect it is because of the amount of info it takes to store a block Yes they are useful in lots of situations, but if your working with mulitple files from the same master file it is easier and takes up alot less time to run as an xref, you then have the ability to change linetype, color, plot style, annotations, etc per sheet... without changing the master itself. Sure you end up with alot of layers and some people dont know how to use them very well... but trust me. When doing civil work they make things very easy. MEP on the other hand i would love to use blocks... you can detail each block with product name, serial number, size, cost,etc... and run quantities and such off of them which is great. Just depends on the work your doing i suppose, and we all know autocad, there are many ways to get to the same solution.... some are just more indepth than others and prone to crashing.

I always do the "Select object" option when hatching aswell because it picks out the boundary easier and you dont have to wait for the program to think about what its hatching... Turn hatching layers off when working in model space and on in viewport for plotting, it will make your program run smoother...