Proxy bog-down

[f.lawton]

Using a new layer, I traced over some simple rectangular ductwork objects on an AutoCAD 2014 drawing. Those objects were created with third party software called Practicad that runs on top of AutoCAD. I know they were done with Practicad because I needed their enabler to make the ductwork visible , plus I was not able to snap to the objects.  I then copy/pasted the new layer containing the tracings onto a blank AutoCAD 2014 drawing. In doing so, I must have brought in hidden Practicad items. And so what should have been, say, a 100 kilobyte file, turned out to be 20 megabytes. Now if I try to do a simple qsave, it takes a couple seconds on both my well-equipped laptop and desktop machines. And if I try to copy the objects to paste them elsewhere, it becomes a multi-minute operation - or it freezes the program. I've tried the usual audit and purge operations. In fact, purge dialogue box reported very few entities. But the funny thing is my colleague with  very similar computers and software experienced zero lag time with this same file. If I save the file as dxf and import it into sketchup, a report says I brought in 4,300 blocks! So my questions are:

1. Why did the proxy stuff come along for the ride during a simple cop/paste of one layer of simple objects from one cad drawing to another?

2. How can I see what the hidden proxy stuff is in the cad program?

3. Why was my colleague able to work the file effortlessly, despite its drawbacks?

4. [Un-related and not super-important] What does the term 'clip' in COPYCLIP stand for? I know what it does, but is it trying to say 'COPY to the CLIPboard'?  The term 'clip' throws me off. 'Clip' sounds more like a removal process.

[pendean]

-EXPORTTOAUTOCAD command (there is a dash in the name) may fix your file.
And the Autodesk Exchange Apps website has several quality PURGE tools that can dig deep to remove excess items in your file.
WBLOCK, not copy/paste, after verifying you actually select only those items you drew, may have been what you should have done initially to create a clean block.

Yes, CLIP means CLIPBOARD, you seem willing to ignore the more important COPY word which doesn't mean "remove" for some reason 😉

[dgorsman]

When you load an object enabler, it is loaded for the session, not the active drawing.  So when the object enabler calls for something to be done (like copying data along with drawing entities to another drawing) then all that information goes with it.  Not to say thats your problem, though - you could be dealing with rogue annotation scales, REGAPPs, DGN linetypes, yadda yadda yadda...

You can try uninstalling the object enabler, or fiddling with registry settings to prevent it loading.  That might be the reason why the other user doesn't experience problems.

When purging there are *two* toggles - what can be purged, and what can't.  The latter frequently gets ignored despite its usefulness in tracking down why certain things cannot be purged.

[f.lawton]

How would I "verify that what I select is what I actually drew"? The objects I drew are on their own layer which I have isolated and then selected with a left-to-right crossing window - at which time the quick properties box correctly says "All (182) .....[circle (1), Multileader (1) and (182) lines]. So with this selection, I run WBLOCK, during which I take the option to use Quick Select just to make sure I have only selected my layer. And when I press <OKAY> the program goes into a protracted hourglass mode. When the wblock is finally created, it behaves just as badly as the copy/clip method. and is the same bloated file size.

[pendean]

Manually select only what you created, start PROPERTIES command and go through the object types Pulldown at the top to ensure you don't see anything unusual you know you did not draw manually as you stated earlier.

See my first reply and the follow up from the other user on what else you need to do to clear excesses in your file that PURGE alone can't handle.

[f.lawton]

I see what you mean about the stuff that can't be purged. it's a lot of items!

[pendean]

AutoCAD 2015's Purge is now able to handle those object types.