Hello,
I am having an odd issue.
I have a ~14Mb drawing that I have audited, purged and set proxygraphics to 0. I have saved down the drawing to 2004, turned on hardware acceleration, set the resolution to curves/surfaces very low and updated all my drivers to the most uptodate for my system.
As far as I can tell, there is no other way of making this drawing smaller and I can't take out any of data within the drawing as it's all pertinent for my design
Whenever I open this drawing, it starts in model and everything is ok. I can switch between paperspace and modelspace with no problems, but whenever I use REGEN or it automatically does this while I am in modelspace (not switching paperspace) Civil freezes completely/takes about 7-10 minutes to regen the drawing if it doesn't end up crashing.
I am at a loss as to what to do to possibly speed this up. Suggestions?
Is it possible that the drawing is looking for a resource that is missing, and your search paths include folders on the network? That might slow things down; we've seen a couple of cases like that.
You may want to open a support case with Autodesk and submit the C3D 2011 version of the drawing for evaluation.
It's the price you pay for the computer you are using. The system you have is 2 years out of date. Hanging onto it will only continue to decrease your productivity. You've hit the hardware wall and have crashed. You're not burning yet, but that's not far off.
With the hardware you have, drawing size is going to be critical. You need to xref & dref to the max at this point. Seperate as much as you can, even to the point of making different drawings for different sites.
The only real fix, though, is a hardware upgrade. You're biggest bottleneck is ram, and to fix that you need a 64bit OS. The second fix is a stable hard drive that's spinning/data transfering as fast as possible. That's where the Western Digital Velicoraptor come in.
Get a new box with a SATA 6.0 HD, 8 to 12 gigs of RAM, Win7 64 Pro (no 32bit home ed.). Your productivity will go up and the system will be much more stable (especially during grading). New boxes can be had for as little as $800 USD that'll do the trick. Don't be swayed by a Terabyte drive - the capicity will never be used. Gett a good Sata 6.0 HD in the 500gb range.
Reid
Has nothing to do with your computer, because i have everything that's mentioned in the posts above. I still have lockups and crashing taking place. Autodesk needs to start slapping some programming hands and get the software back to where it was stable. 2011 and 2012 is very problematic, to the point where i'm almost looking for alternate software.
I have a machine that runs fine with civil 3d 2012 - I purposefully built it to brute force the software and avoid xref and dref; it is as stable as can be - crashes occasionally when deleting surface lines, otherwise solid. The three core criteria in my experience that I think worked:
These are big investments in a few hardware components and it takes time to learn how to instal and tune them. There are lots of help forums to walk you though the process. Due to approaching the wall I just started tuning my computer last month and yesterday posted the results in a tuning forum - the response is that I have done a good job, so I think anyone can do this. Try posting on one of the forums and ask, what can I do with this machine to build it. You can probbaly reuse some of your parts like the case and power supply.
On very large models you will still need to practice the alternative of building a bunch of little models and compiling them - so a nice skill to learn anyways.
Wow, you're talking some pretty big bucks. I'd like to see a real company pay for that computer... Halarious!
What is hilarious is that they do even if they don't.
They can pay upfront the extra cost, my computer cost $1,800 - or they can pay over the lifetime of the machine for the reduced productivity. I am guessing a CAD tech is about $40+ an hour including benefits, social security contribution, office space, workers comp, and management overhead. So every week the CAD tech cost what a CAD machine costs. Even if this machine increases my productivity by 5%, I'd buy a new machine every year and donate the old one. I read a detailed technical report written by a VDC engineer that worked on a large civil project on the West Coast, and this was the core debate he had with his managers about his x32 box.
We should have started with the simple stuff - what temperature is your machine running when it locks. I use core temp. Try opening the side panel to your machine and place a 14" boxfan directed at the motherboard - it pulls my temps down from 40°C to 30°C and on an older machine was the difference between lockup and working. Also, I tuned off auto save to eliminate the annoying regens.
Jesse -
A couple of the more common issues I see for large dwg file size when it does not make sense is a large number of scales in your scale list, and a large number of purgable registered apps.
Run scalelistedit and get rid of any scales you are not using.
Run a commandline command called -purge (don't forget the - ), select R for regapps. Use * to select all, and don't verify. I had one drawing that had 300,000 purgable regapps (I'd hate to verify each one of them) - but performance after purging regapps on that drawing was like night & day. Typically if I have a drawing that is bogged down by regapps, it's a 1000 or more regapps that get purged out, and I have had drawings go from +10MB to under 1MB.
ideally run audits, purges, etc on the lowest child drawing and work your way up to the partent drawings. I believe scalelistedit and puring regapps comes in a bat version to perform cleanup on folders at a time.
Something else to try is -wblock and using * to select the entire drawing.
-Bruce
Don't forget... You must never use your Task Pane and connect to shape files, or have XREFs because who needs xrefs, haha. We're in 2012 not 2000i here, it's about time the software is improved on the operations side of things. The hotfix and service pack approach is a joke. Asside from "select similar" what features in AutoCAD have come in within the last 5 years that you could say I'm so glad we pay $6000+ a year for a subscription license. When we used to pay $5000 flat every 3-4 years.
Sorry LeafRider_km
I'm not sure how this relates to my post, or how it helps the OP.
-Bruce
Someone always has a 100 ways to make it faster and less likely to crash. Thing is, it still crashes. Should you attempt to use the Block Editor for some reason, simialr results... You might have a 15 minute wait on your hands for a regen. Recommended solution?
It is applicable - I see the connection and hear the point.
So, I do not use the bock editor for much more than rectagular footings and I purposely built this machine to avoid xrefs. Check this thread out, Josh is there telling me to divide the 3D model and conquer not try to brute force it with hardware. But the point is I did brute force it and it worked - with room to spare and more hardware on the horizon. I agree that nobody is winning any software development awards for C3D performance but the current version is what we have and the machine I am sitting at is the one that works given the conditions outlined in the linked thread. And, what seems to have made it work are unlocked motherboard+cpu, SSD RAID0 harddrive, and very quick DDR3 memory response (slow for DDR4).
From what I am seeing here - C3D can be conquered with existing hardware and without spending mega-bucks. The Dual Core x32 machine that is the core of this thread - is going to have a hard time; maybe 3GB switch and Server 2003 free from deamspark with student email address, and latest nvidia drivers - maybe update all the drivers and the BIOS, and clear %temp%. What else is running in services - 5 instances of SQL and XE? Change the computer properties/advanced system settings/performace options/visual effects to 'best performance' (you will lose the little green start icon) - and on the advanced tab try changing your virtual memory to 8GB. Another, change NtfsMemoryUsage to 2.
Jesse, post a link to your CPU-z and your temperature. At least lets baseline that you are getting everyting out of that Intel that it can do.