Attached XREFs affecting drawing performance

[Rbaltazar]

I've discovered that attached XREFs are greatly affecting the software performance.  Simple tasks like move, pan, selecting objects, drawing lines, etc. operate very slowly and cause the program to 'lag' and there's delay after starting a command (about1-3 seconds on average).  After detaching the XREFs, the software will operate just fine - no lagging, no delay.

Is there some system variable or setting that's somehow been toggled off?  What things should I be checking for that might cause attached / overlaid XREFs to affect operation?

Thanks for your time!

Ryan

[Jay_B]

There can be many causes of slowness and many factors will have an effect on performance.

Without a bunch of information such as computer specs, network factors, drawing sizes & what troubleshooting steps have been taken so far, it's hard to say what might be causing it.

Did this just start with this particular project? Or does this problem occur on every drawing with xref's on all projects?

Does it appear to be user / machine specific or does it affect similar installs the same?

A couple things to try:

Does system variable XLOADCTL = 2 ?

Try all of the common drawing corruption remedies in the main dwg and ALL xref's in play.

Often times an xref can be the dwg causing issues.

[Joe-Bouza]

Beyond System variables and corrupt files, I'll take a guess without looking that there are numerous nested refs that cross ref each other and create a circular nightmare for the cpu.

one little file header out of place in that scenario will spoil the whole busshel.

[civilman1957]

Are your XREF's overlaid or attached? Attaching will cause the slowness...

[klugb]

Have you tried to set the layer filter to exclude the xref layers, which most people don't want to see all the time anyway?

[annw2]

If you only need a portion of the XREF, try XCLIP

[klugb]

Just to clarify, my fix doesn't change the display of any layers it just excludes them from the dropdown list. This improves performance greatly depending on how many xref's & layers you have. It is just a speed thing.

[Anonymous]

Just want to say thank you even though it's an old post.

I've searched for hours through different forums and this worked for my situation!

I'm working in the construction industry referencing architectural drawings all the time and the billion layers architects use made the lag unbearable.

[kieranobrien]

Sorry also realise that this is an old post but I  recently encountered an issue when it came editing and plotting a drawing with xrefs. Audit or recovery didn't note an errors in the working drawing or when I opened and checked the xref's . 

After some trial and error I was able to trace the issue back to a missing shape file for a third party linetype on a survey xref. AutoCAD kept scanning the support paths (including network locations)  before and after commands, looking for a missing shx file used on the custom linetype which resulted in a lag between commands. 

The fix that worked for me was to change all the non standard lintypes to standard AutoCAD in the xref and purge the shapefile