Civil 3D 2020 Slow saving files with unloaded XREFs

[TonyLeggieri3279]

Help! We just installed Civil 3D 2020 (and also updated to 2020.2) (as well as an update to Windows 10). 

We have noticed on most machines that when a drawing has unloaded XREFs, when a save is performed, it will "bog down" and take a long time. It also has the "Synchronizing references" bar pop up repeatedly in the bottom right.

While looking into this a little more, we also noticed that the .DWL and .DWL2 files were opening for the unloaded XREFs when we hit save.

We have the following variables set to:

1. XLOADCTL set to 2
2. DEMANDLOAD set to 3
3. SAVEFIDELITY set to 0

Are these even variables we should be looking at? Which other variables should we check?

If we reload the XREFs and qsave, the save is almost instant. Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.

[tom_berning]

I am adding my test results but will also submit a support request. I started this testing on a system with 20.3 installed. The drawing I am testing has 5 xrefs with 2 unloaded 22 pipe networks drefed in. This is from a large project that is still in 2016. The save time in 16 was 7 seconds. The first save time in 20.3 was 22 minutes. I uninstalled 20.3 and am running 20.1.1. I batch saved all the source drawings and the 5 xrefs to 20 format and the save time jumped to 27 minutes. It seemed to be opening all the source files of the drefs during the save so I thought it was related to the drefs. I detached the 2 xrefs that were unloaded and my save time reverted back to about 6 seconds. I reinstalled 20.3 and my save time remained about 6 seconds.

[CADvisers]

Tom,

Thanks for posting results. 

I too, thought it might be drefs as well during my troubleshooting.  But that wasn't the case.

It was entirely the user permissions assigned to the temporary xref folder.

Once changing the users full access to the folder in Windows 10, everything was saving in seconds even if xrefs were unloaded or loaded.

[Anonymous]

To all still having issues that User Permissions does not solve and Dev Team, I have a partial solution for us:

For whatever reason if I detach the xrefs and then reattach them save times are back to normal.  As we are working remotely over the VPN, these saves were taking even longer than normal.  I only have one user with the update for this reason (odd install, wouldn't work without SP1, one of my few Stand-alone licenses)

It is an annoying fix, as we also have to save the layer state, but is way better than 5 minute saves and Autosaves.

I am thinking that in our plot drawings, which only contain XREFS this shouldn't be needed as they are all loaded all the time.

I had seen something similar in early testing on new projects, they did not have the issue.

I hope this helps others, and the dev team troubleshoot the issue.  While I consider this a "workaround" it is still hugely disruptive and time consuming.  It needs to be fixed.

Thanks,

[Anonymous]

So as a followup after a couple of hours of use.  One user reports some performance improvement.  Me not so much.  If it works, loads are very long

I am going to uninstall.

It appears it MAY make saves better, but if you are having the issue and don't have to have the update, uninstall.

I was hopeful, it appeared to work, but back to no SP for me.

Thanks,

[JeffPaulsen · Accepted solution]

The readme for Civil 3D 2020.4 states:
"Improved performance when saving a drawing with unloaded external references."

I've downloaded the update and will try it later today.

[JeffPaulsen]

The 2020.4 Update seems to have fixed this slow save issue. It took about 10 seconds to save a drawing with unloaded xrefs that took over 30 minutes to save with 2020.2.

[TonyLeggieri3279]

2020.4 seems to fix that issue for us as well, but we will keep an eye on it.