Performance

[Anonymous]

I run 3D 2007 SP3 on Pentium 3.2 GHz and 2mb RAM. I have serious perfomance issues with Civil 3D. Commands take ages and I wait about 60 - 70% of a day for commands to complete. The bigger the drawing grows, the longer everything takes. We had a similar problem with LDT and aquired 3D and reduced the use of vieports although we always need a few. Our drawings consist mostly of 20 - 30 layouts with one viewport each and xrefs. If I delete all the layouts and have just a model space, it does not improve the performance. Any information will help, also about the best ways of putting a drawing together with all the xrefs, layouts and viewports. Are there more people that experience these kind of performance issues or am I the exception?

[Anonymous]

This "...and 2mb RAM..." seems a tad below minimum windows specs, much less
C3D. 🙂

Sorry, I haven't had any projects, yet, that require that amount of Layouts.
My typical drawing size is <10mb and the only time I experience signficant
slowdown is when I have large corridors defined.

wrote in message news:5422045@discussion.autodesk.com...
I run 3D 2007 SP3 on Pentium 3.2 GHz and 2mb RAM. I have serious perfomance
issues with Civil 3D. Commands take ages and I wait about 60 - 70% of a day
for commands to complete. The bigger the drawing grows, the longer
everything takes. We had a similar problem with LDT and aquired 3D and
reduced the use of vieports although we always need a few. Our drawings
consist mostly of 20 - 30 layouts with one viewport each and xrefs. If I
delete all the layouts and have just a model space, it does not improve the
performance. Any information will help, also about the best ways of putting
a drawing together with all the xrefs, layouts and viewports. Are there more
people that experience these kind of performance issues or am I the
exception?

[Anonymous]

I am sorry! The RAM is 2 Gig not mb.

[Anonymous]

Make sure your temp folder is cleaned out regularly.
open task manager to check on ram usage.
minimize the application to free up ram.

30 Layouts is way too many IMO.

John Postlewait
IS Department
George Butler Associates, Inc.

[Anonymous]

Mikie wrote:
> I run 3D 2007 SP3 on Pentium 3.2 GHz and 2mb RAM. I have serious
> perfomance issues with Civil 3D. Commands take ages and I wait about
> 60 - 70% of a day for commands to complete. The bigger the drawing
> grows, the longer everything takes. We had a similar problem with LDT
> and aquired 3D and reduced the use of vieports although we always
> need a few. Our drawings consist mostly of 20 - 30 layouts with one
> viewport each and xrefs. If I delete all the layouts and have just a
> model space, it does not improve the performance. Any information
> will help, also about the best ways of putting a drawing together
> with all the xrefs, layouts and viewports. Are there more people that
> experience these kind of performance issues or am I the exception?

One thing you didn't mention was your video card. That's pretty big.

Otherwise, I'm running pretty much the same spec as you (give or take a
few), and having no problems. I haven't heard anyone else here having
issues that severe either. I do think that 20-30 layouts is a bit
much, and how many xrefs are in your drawings? What's the average file
size of one of your drawings?


--
Jason Hickey

Civil 3D 2007, SP3
Dell Precision M70
2 GIG RAM, 256 MB nVidia Quadro FX Go1400
Intel Centrino 2 gHz Processor

www.civil3d.com

[Anonymous]

Mike,

When you are using multiple layouts, it is best to
set the Layout Regen Options as in the figure below.  AutoCAD stores ALL
the layouts unless this setting is changed, and this can REALLY affect
performance.

[img src="@132659"]

--
Larry Bettes
ADT, C3D &
LDT/CD
(all 2007 with all SPs installed)
P4 - Dual Core 3.0 GHz, 3.00 GB
RAM
nVidia GeForce 6800 GS AGP - 256 MB
Windows XP Pro, SP 2

<jpostlewait> wrote in message
href="news:5422152@discussion.autodesk.com">
size=2>news:5422152@discussion.autodesk.com
size=2>...

Make sure your temp folder is
cleaned out regularly.
open task manager to check on ram usage.
minimize
the application to free up ram.

30 Layouts is way too many
IMO.

John Postlewait
IS Department
George Butler Associates,
Inc.

[Anonymous]

what is worse than the speed penalty is the stability issue.
Everyone has seen C3D crash regularly so having all your sheets together like that seems like asking for trouble.
I tell my designers to have one layout per dwg.
I think this is a side issue though since deleting them did not solve things.
do things go that slow if you use a fresh drawing and just modelspace - no viewports?

Mikie <>
|>I run 3D 2007 SP3 on Pentium 3.2 GHz and 2mb RAM. I have serious perfomance issues with Civil 3D. Commands take ages and I wait about 60 - 70% of a day for commands to complete. The bigger the drawing grows, the longer everything takes. We had a similar problem with LDT and aquired 3D and reduced the use of vieports although we always need a few. Our drawings consist mostly of 20 - 30 layouts with one viewport each and xrefs. If I delete all the layouts and have just a model space, it does not improve the performance. Any information will help, also about the best ways of putting a drawing together with all the xrefs, layouts and viewports. Are there more people that experience these kind of performance issues or am I the exception?
James Maeding
Civil Engineer and Programmer
jmaeding - athunsaker - com

[Anonymous]

James since SP3 things have gotten a ton better.
You can still make it blow up but you got to work at it.
Lots of progress made in the last few months.

John P.

[Anonymous]

I have done the following
1) Cleaned out the Temp folder
2) Checked the Task Manager - the CPU usage is at most 50% and while waiting on a command the RAM is at 25% of capacity
3) Set layout regen settings to cache model and all viewports
Everything is still way too slow even if I delete all the layouts. I got more than 30 fatal errors in the past 14 days after a repair of the program. Is there a significant difference between using the sheet manager and plotting layouts?

[Anonymous]

How much stuff are you x-ref'ing in? Are you sure your computer is healthy?
no bad hardware or anything? Does it bomb out on other computers or just
yours?

Shawn

[Anonymous]

I am afraid it does the same on other computers as well and not with any other programs

[WILLGIS]

Your not the only one. I've been trying to increase the performance as well, with little luck. I've change the viewport cacheing and gained some performance, but still not were I'd like it to be. We run decent machines as well and seems to have little difference. We are running Dell Precision 380 workstations, with 3.0 Processors, 4GB of Ram, Nvidia Quadro FX 1400 Graphics Cards. I'd also like to know what can be done.

Our Plans usually consist of over 50+ Layouts, were some of those sheets have multiple Viewports(Plan and Profile Sheets). The Viewports seem to be the cause of the performance issues from my observations anyway, when objects in these viewports are froze or turned off, we see a decrease in the regen time of these Layouts. Civil 3D has great functionality but poor stability.

Is it better to break up our plans and have multiple drawings with fewer viewports, I don't like this concept as it's more files to manage. We really don't see any performance issues until we've got 20 to 30 Layouts. And you guys responded to this thread saying that he has too many layouts? We have to have this many, it is what's needed for the plans, can you guys clarify on this, do you mean have multiple drawings with fewer layouts, or?? Just looking for suggestions.

[Anonymous]

We just evolved into a one file one sheet setup over the years. Some agree some don't with this concept, but for what it's worth that's how we do it.
Started a long time ago with having 3 or four people working on a project it was the best way to allow different people to get in and work.

Plus when your dwg goes belly-up as is the case occasionally we only have one corrupt sheet to replace, not the entire project.

John Postlewait
IS Department
George Butler Associates, Inc.

[kirknoonan]

"One file one sheet setup"?? How do you turn that into plan and profile drawings for continuous sections of roadway? Or long runs of pipe? Or...?

I've been in the unfortunate position of working with files with 80+ layout tabs. It is slow. Turn off the autosave. Audit and purge before you save, save often even though it takes a couple of minutes and remember, the first revision you make where everything is dynamically updated makes it all worth while.

[Anonymous]

Each plan and profile sheet is in it's own dwg.
Most everything is referenced in one way or the other.
We are currently looking at how Civil3D will effect this model but it seems to work o.k.

And ya I know JW you just haven't beaten me with that training hammer yet.

John P.

[Anonymous]

I really appreciate the feedback so far. What about some feedback from the creators of this software? Are we doing something wrong? Is there a right way? We recently bought five new 3D licenses and I do not know how to explain this situation to my bossman. If one can't use 20 - 30 or even 80 layouts with viewports what are you supposed to do?

[kirknoonan]

I don't know if you are using Vault or not. I'm not. One good way to keep drawings smaller and more responsive is to break them down into their basic "elements" and link them together using data shortcuts or the Vault. For example: one drawing with your eg surface, one drawing with your proposed alignments and parcels. Links from these two drawings combined in a third drawing to create pipes and corridors. It is a crude example, but with a little thought, you can break everything up into manageable pieces. Then x-ref everything into a drawing that contains you layout tabs, or use the sheet set manager to publish the layouts.

[ACADuser]

>>2) Checked the Task Manager - the CPU usage is at most 50%>>

With hyperthreading enabled on a single core processor, 50% = 100%.

[WILLGIS]

Another thing is it the Viewports causing the performance issues?, or just the sheer volume of Layouts?

The Xref concept may work, I certainly wouldn't go down to single drawings, workflow would be reduced having to jump from sheet to sheet, but I guess with the regen times we are seeing now with viewports this may be about the same. Just managing that many sheets is what holds me back from this concept, our Plans range from 50 to 70 depending on the project each year.

Some thoughts...

1. You go to a single drawing for each sheet, xrefing your base drawing. This would obviously help performance but at the cost of managing more files(.dwgs)

2. You break the project up in parts, having 10 to 15 layouts per drawings, xrefing in your base drawing. Would we see a significant performance increase using this method, or is this still to many layouts/viewports? I may try this after this years project, using our current one, we are too far along to change things up with deadlines around the corner.

[Anonymous]

You know, there are probably as many opinions on this subject as there are
users! I for one try to educate my users as to the best approach when
working with multiple drawings and multiple engineers. If you're placing
all your eggs in one basket, you're simply putting yourself at risk for
creating corruption in multiple drawings (tabs) rather than just one or two.
Granted, I've not seen many drawings becoming hosed in a while since the
software's continually getting better and better, but, the fact of the
matter is that, as I believe Mr. Postlewait stated, if your drawing goes
belly-up, you're only gonna corrupt one sheet, not an entire project.

If you're holding back because you think it's more difficult managing
sheets, then you really haven't taken advantage of the sheet set
functionality in basic AutoCAD. And dare I say anything about Civil 3D
2008? Well, let's just say that you should really rethink the method you're
using for putting your drawings/sheets together, one drawing/one tab is our
standard and it works very well, particularly using sheet sets and sharing
amongst multiple users.

But if you insist on keeping all your drawings in one file then you might
also consider going into the options dialog and setting your layout regen
option to only cache the model tab and last layout rather than all layouts.
That'll force a regen when you switch tabs, which will obviously be slower,
but it'll free up the memory that can be consumed fairly quickly with the
number of tabs you're using.

Good luck with whatever route you dedice to puruse.

--
Kelly W. Boyd
CAD/CAE Support Engineer
Pierce County Public Works
Tacoma, WA

wrote in message news:5423321@discussion.autodesk.com...
Another thing is it the Viewports causing the performance issues?, or just
the sheer volume of Layouts?

The Xref concept may work, I certainly wouldn't go down to single drawings,
workflow would be reduced having to jump from sheet to sheet, but I guess
with the regen times we are seeing now with viewports this may be about the
same. Just managing that many sheets is what holds me back from this
concept, our Plans range from 50 to 70 depending on the project each year.

Some thoughts...

1. You go to a single drawing for each sheet, xrefing your base drawing.
This would obviously help performance but at the cost of managing more
files(.dwgs)

2. You break the project up in parts, having 10 to 15 layouts per drawings,
xrefing in your base drawing. Would we see a significant performance
increase using this method, or is this still to many layouts/viewports? I
may try this after this years project, using our current one, we are too far
along to change things up with deadlines around the corner.