data shortcuts don't seem to be faster

[Anonymous]

We had a drawing that was getting rather large and unmanageable (54MB), so we moved our existing ground surface and our main alignment into another drawing and are referencing them as data shortcuts. This brought the file size down to 18MB.

The problem is, the drawing actually seems to run slower than it did before. In particular, any operations involving the referenced surface seem to take forever. Adding a contour label to the referenced surface takes 36 seconds for each label. A surface that is live in the drawing and almost as large and complex as the existing surface only takes 6 seconds to add a label to (still too slow).

Am I crazy, or are data shortcuts not helping?

This is not a large project. It is 60 acres, 14 lots and 3300 feet of road.

I am using a 3.2GHz Pentium 4, 2GB RAM, and 256MB ATI Radeon X600 graphics card.

[Anonymous]

with C3D 2007, SP3?

--
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

[Anonymous]

Yes, C3D 2007, SP3.

Is anyone else experiencing these slow speed issues?

[Anonymous]

I would suspect that something in the 18MB drawing is causing the slowness.

For the sake of troubleshooting, have you tried creating a data reference to
the large surface in a brand new drawing? When you label in this brand new
drawing, how long does it take?

Sincerely,
Drew Burgasser
CAD Masters, Inc.
www.cadmasters.com


wrote in message news:5542900@discussion.autodesk.com...
We had a drawing that was getting rather large and unmanageable (54MB), so
we moved our existing ground surface and our main alignment into another
drawing and are referencing them as data shortcuts. This brought the file
size down to 18MB.

The problem is, the drawing actually seems to run slower than it did before.
In particular, any operations involving the referenced surface seem to take
forever. Adding a contour label to the referenced surface takes 36 seconds
for each label. A surface that is live in the drawing and almost as large
and complex as the existing surface only takes 6 seconds to add a label to
(still too slow).

Am I crazy, or are data shortcuts not helping?

This is not a large project. It is 60 acres, 14 lots and 3300 feet of road.

I am using a 3.2GHz Pentium 4, 2GB RAM, and 256MB ATI Radeon X600 graphics
card.

[Anonymous]

When I do that, the surface labels show up instantly.

What sorts of things should I be looking for that could be slowing it down?

By the way, the drawing takes about 5 minutes to open, and any operation in the layer properties manager takes a minute or more to complete after selecting OK. I'm not sure why creating a new layer requires it to think so hard.

[Anonymous]

What does your 18MB drawing consist of?
Parcels, alignments, profiles, corridors, section views, gradings, pipes?

I've seen some drawings slow to crawl simply due to too much stuff in them.
Modularity is the key. For example, if you have corridors and sections
views in this 18MB drawing, maybe you could move those to a different
drawing.

Sincerely,
Drew Burgasser
CAD Masters, Inc.
www.cadmasters.com



wrote in message news:5543288@discussion.autodesk.com...
When I do that, the surface labels show up instantly.

What sorts of things should I be looking for that could be slowing it down?

By the way, the drawing takes about 5 minutes to open, and any operation in
the layer properties manager takes a minute or more to complete after
selecting OK. I'm not sure why creating a new layer requires it to think so
hard.

[Anonymous]

The 18 MB drawing consists of all of the above.

The problem is, it's logical to have the profile in the same drawing as the plan, since they usually end up on the same layout in our plan and profile sheets.

I would, however, love to move the section views to another drawing, but how do I keep them linked to my corridor if I do that?

Come to think of it, I seem to remember the performance really going downhill after creating the section views.

[Anonymous]

I had the same problem. I used the corridor surfaces and the OG surface as
references in a separate drawing and did the sections and volume tables
there. The only issue is if you are trying to label the sections, you can't
have them label by corridor link but by section break. Not nearly as
automatic... bummer!

--
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


wrote in message news:5543635@discussion.autodesk.com...
The 18 MB drawing consists of all of the above.

The problem is, it's logical to have the profile in the same drawing as the
plan, since they usually end up on the same layout in our plan and profile
sheets.

I would, however, love to move the section views to another drawing, but how
do I keep them linked to my corridor if I do that?

Come to think of it, I seem to remember the performance really going
downhill after creating the section views.

[Anonymous]

Yeah, section views really seem to slow drawings down in my experience.

If you could somehow get those section views to a different drawing (via
Larry's suggestion), that may be the key.

Maybe something like this...
drawing 1 - og surface
drawing 2 - alignment and profile
drawing 3 - corridor, fg surface (and maybe section views)
drawing 4 - section views
(all linked with shortcuts or vault)

Sincerely,
Drew Burgasser
CAD Masters, Inc.
www.cadmasters.com


wrote in message news:5543635@discussion.autodesk.com...
The 18 MB drawing consists of all of the above.

The problem is, it's logical to have the profile in the same drawing as the
plan, since they usually end up on the same layout in our plan and profile
sheets.

I would, however, love to move the section views to another drawing, but how
do I keep them linked to my corridor if I do that?

Come to think of it, I seem to remember the performance really going
downhill after creating the section views.

[Anonymous]

Does Civil 3D derive any advantage from the dual core processors?

[BrianHailey]

Hey Drew,

I don't think you could have drawing 4 since corridors can't be shared via data shortcuts or vault and your sections often time need to have a corridor as a data source. I would love to see corridors shortcutable (I just made up that word). I think it should work along the same lines as a profile, when you reference the profile, the alignment is automatically referenced so, when you reference a corridor, all the alignments and profiles would be referenced too (perhaps assemblies as well?).

Brian

[Civil3DReminders_com]

Try setting the sample line surface section to static while you are labeling the surface to see if that helps. Try turning off the section views while you are not working on them, or if you don't have much edits to the section views, deleting the section views (only the views in properties it should just show sections views) and then recreating the views when you are done doing the other things you need to do in the drawing.

I think the program is updating each surface section, label and view with each label added to the surface is causing the delay. I noticed with renaming manholes in a pipe network that if I went to a layout tab with no viewports that it went quickly, if I was in model space I had to wait for the program to update all of my labels causing a 2-5 second delay after each mh# change. It may also apply here.

[Anonymous]

Ed,

I've got to ask the question of why the existing surface and one alignment
is 34mb. That seems to me to be an incredibly large file for that size
site. I've done very little in C3D, but the one site I did was about 75 ac.
with about 250' in elevation change and single corridor. That file is about
7mb. I'm just curious and wonder if something else is going on.

Pat

wrote in message news:5542900@discussion.autodesk.com...
We had a drawing that was getting rather large and unmanageable (54MB), so
we moved our existing ground surface and our main alignment into another
drawing and are referencing them as data shortcuts. This brought the file
size down to 18MB.

The problem is, the drawing actually seems to run slower than it did before.
In particular, any operations involving the referenced surface seem to take
forever. Adding a contour label to the referenced surface takes 36 seconds
for each label. A surface that is live in the drawing and almost as large
and complex as the existing surface only takes 6 seconds to add a label to
(still too slow).

Am I crazy, or are data shortcuts not helping?

This is not a large project. It is 60 acres, 14 lots and 3300 feet of road.

I am using a 3.2GHz Pentium 4, 2GB RAM, and 256MB ATI Radeon X600 graphics
card.

[BrianHailey]

Just watched the latest webcast and you can now sample section for a corridor through an xref so you can have drawing4! Yeah!

Brian

[Anonymous]

Well, the original surface was built from aerial contours, and may not have been weeded as much as it should have been. I did not have the luxury of getting the TIN from the aerial company, which would have been likely about one fourth the size of the surface I'm working with. But, also, there is about 400 feet of elevation change on the property and a large number of eskers and breaks.

Can a surface be weeded after it has been built? I started with contours, then I added a lot of on-the-ground shots where changes had been made to the land and where ground had been obscured, and then I massaged it a lot to get the two data sets to come together smoothly, and once I was done, I exported it to an XML and that's what I've been working with. Any suggestions for downsizing a surface with too many points? I don't want to re-build the surface from contours again because it is a recipe for flat triangle and intersecting contours. It took me forever to iron them out, and the 2007 surface utilties that are supposed to eliminate flat triangles doesn't seem to get them all.

[Sinc]

Yeah. If you listen to internet radio, the second processor will keep playing your radio station while the first processor chugs away at 100%... 🙂

Seriously though, there is a minimal benefit drawn from the fact that aspects of Windows know how to use dual-processors. But the benefit is very slight.

[Matt.Anderson]

I am just trying to follow what you did with Contours yor recieved.

AP-Contour Drawing has lots of polylines with elevations.
Did you create the surface here? (See www.civil3d.com/index.php/2007/02/son-of-the-polylinethingy/ )
Did you add the additional topo here as points or a point file?

Did you snapshot your surface?

The XML file - is that a Datashortcut or did you LandXML that final surface out into another drawing?

Matthew Anderson
Civil 3d SP3 2007 / Beta 08

[Anonymous]

We received 2' contours as polylines. This was in December of 2005, so we were using C3D2006 at the time. 2006 would not build the surface from the polylines, so we built it in Land Desktop. Then brought in ground topo points in Land Desktop as well. This was exported to an XML file, and imported into a Civil 3D drawing. Time was then spent in Civil 3D editing the surface, swapping edges, adding dummy points to eliminate intersecting contours and flat triangles.

This final surface was placed in a separate drawing using XML export/import.

I have not tried the process at the link you listed. I am concerned that if I do that, all of my flat triangles will come back, and it took me days to get rid of them.

I did not snapshot the surface.

[Anonymous]

C3D 07 added triangulation settings that automate the elimination of flat
triangles in ways that LDT never even dreamed of doing.

--
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


wrote in message news:5544642@discussion.autodesk.com...
We received 2' contours as polylines. This was in December of 2005, so we
were using C3D2006 at the time. 2006 would not build the surface from the
polylines, so we built it in Land Desktop. Then brought in ground topo
points in Land Desktop as well. This was exported to an XML file, and
imported into a Civil 3D drawing. Time was then spent in Civil 3D editing
the surface, swapping edges, adding dummy points to eliminate intersecting
contours and flat triangles.

This final surface was placed in a separate drawing using XML export/import.

I have not tried the process at the link you listed. I am concerned that if
I do that, all of my flat triangles will come back, and it took me days to
get rid of them.

I did not snapshot the surface.

[Anonymous]

Does it only work if the surface is built from contour data in Civil 3D? Because it definetly does not work on a surface that has flat triangles that has been imported without the source data.