How big is too big?

[ddelloch]

I'm dealing with a fairly large project. My baseplans are split into phases. The first phase has about 25 roads, totaling somewhere near 30-35km (18-20 miles). A good deal of the roads contain fairly complex corridors. X-Section views are run every 20 meters, so that is 1500 views. its a very steep site so my profile views are having to be split various times to make them work for our design sheet scale requirements. In the end I will be 100-200 profile views.

This is an on going process, and currently all of these things reside in our phase 1 road design baseplan. Lineworks and existing features are in separate drawings for the sake of simplicity. Right now, 1/2 way through the process, the drawing comes in at nearly 20mb. Working in the drawing isn't really isn't too much of an issue. When you are moving around and doing things you can tell it is a large file, but its still workable for the moment. How big of a file is going to be too big? all of our hardware is generally cutting edge top of the line, or very close. When this gets a bit bigger is working in it going to ruin my life? How big of a file is reasonable? For the sake of simplicity and workflow I would definitely rather not split the file any further.
I am running into problems when I xref this plan to our design drawings... a lot of time wasted waiting for simple plots to spool. Not sure if this is a factor caused by Vault or the size of the xref.

Any ideas?

Dieter Delloch
Webster Engineering