Loading XREFS very slow

[Angayo]

My computer has become extremely slow at loading XREFs into Autocad. For one particular set my colleague’s computer was more than 100 times faster. I am referring to attaching an XREF for the first time to a drawing. Once that is done, loading the drawing is fairly fast.

Now Autocad is loading an XREF since about 55 minutes. One i5 CPU is at 100% load. In the temp folder the file UNDFB542.ac$ is growing and and now over 1GB. (It seems to have started fairly large already for it is growing slowly). I have already deleted dan .ac$ file of 9 GB from Mai 16th.

How can I use XREFS without a lot of patience or bothering my colleagues ?

[pendean]

>>>...One i5 CPU is at 100% load...<<<
Restart Windows and try again, you've got something else going on: still slow?

BTW, AutoCAD is a single processor application, if you have more than one they do nothing at all with the program.

[Angayo]

I had already restarted the computer.

I went home and when I came back, Autocad was still busy. So after about 15 hours trying to attach an XREF I killed it and I restarted the computer

The file UND542.ac$ has grown to 8,62 GB. I deleted it. I am trying to attach the same XREF now for a few minutes. I have no idea how long it will take.

[Angayo]

Edit : It could have to do with the fact that I tried to attach with a scale of 0.1. My colleague had speed problems too, but then he tried to attach without rescaling and then it went fast.

[pendean]

As a general rul, if something like that does not complete in a reasonable time frame (10-30 minutes) it will never complete: the days of leaving things to run overnight are gone.

Glad you found a fix: were you trying to compensate for a needed scale, or was that an accidental setting of 0.1?

[Angayo]

I was trying to get a desired scale to get dimensions to display in cm iso mm.

[Angayo]

The problem is related to the following.

I use a dwg file as template. In Options à AEC Objects setting tab à Automatically attach AEC Property Set Definitions is checked.

As soon as Autocad sees an XREF, it jumps on it and tries to apply AEC Property Settings to it. For some XREFs that is very slow, even if it has less than 100.000 elements.

Unchecking the options works, but then property set definitions are no longer applied to objects. It is annoying to have to do that manually. I don’t want to property sets definitions to be applied to XREFs.

Exploding blocks does not resolve the problem.

I tried the exporttoautocad command once, which did not resolve the problem.

I assume stuff like purge, audit and overkill shave off a few % each, but that does not compensate for the factor 1000 added by the application of AEC object settings.

The solution for the use would appear to be one of these two :

• Exclude XREFs from automatic application of Property Set Definitions.
• Repair XREFs so that the application of the Property Set Definitions is reasonably fast.

Any ideas ?

[-FDC-]

If it is not too much work try changing the TrueType fonts in the xrefs to shx.

[Angayo]

Thanks. I will try that when the problem arises again.

This time I used the following workaround.

Contrary to when importing an XREF, when reloading an XREF Autocad does not try to apply AEC property set defintions to the updated XREF (or it is very much faster). This allows, through meddling a bit with copies and file names in Windows Explorer, to import an almost empty XREF with the desired name and then replacing it with the real one.