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Autocad 2017 slow load on 3D only


der_sed

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Hi,

 

I have a small workshop where i make agricultural equipment.

Setup was very primitive but recently Ive started going modern - and first thing is that Ive done is that I hired a engineer to convert my engineering drawings on paper to autocad.

2D drawings were opening fine, but when he started submitting 3D- my laptop hangs when trying to open them. Here is what happens:

-I open the file

-CPU util touches 40-50%

-RAM slowly starts to increase and goes upto 70%

-Disk load isnt that high

-After 15 minutes the file loads.

 

I thought my laptop was under-powered so i thought of buying a Dell T5600 workstation (32 core, 32GB RAM, 2GB Quadro,) but when I went to the dealer to test it before buying- I got the same results as on my laptop. Took more than 10-12 mins to load. Just CPU util was low this time.

 

My hunch is that the engineer did not optimise the drawing properly and there is some issue with his designing methods- and not an issue with autocad or the hardware.

 

Im uploading the drawings here on Dropbox[ ] and Google Drive[ https://goo.gl/ZHJ5Tu ] (35 mins remaining for upload at the time of creation of this post)

 

Kindly let me know what the engineer is doing wrong that is causing such heavy loading times even on powerful workstations.

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I only opened one of your files because, as you said, it takes about 15 minutes to open. Once the file opened, I started inspecting the model and I see a lot of problems with objects not lining up correctly as well as overlapping each other. That's not really an issue in terms of slow opening of the file though. That's just an observation which makes me think your engineer is not very savvy when it comes to 3D work.

 

The main problem that I see is groups of objects that should have been combined as a single unit inside a block. For instance, you have lots of nuts, washers and bolts which are a collection of 5 different objects. Combining these 5 objects into a block means it's now only one object which can be copied around to other locations and Autocad only has to deal with the one block instance instead of hundreds of individual objects. Creating blocks for these groups of objects will keep your file sizes down and help Autocad perform better because the program will only have to deal with a few blocks instead of having to keep track of every single little object in the file. I believe these files could be heavily optimized which should drastically improve performance.

 

FYI: I have moved your question to the 3D modeling section: http://www.cadtutor.net/forum/forumdisplay.php?20-AutoCAD-3D-Modelling-amp-Rendering

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Yikes! I won't even bother trying to download or open one of them. All I have is 12GB of RAM on this system.

 

der_sed: What steps have you taken to keep file sizes at a minimum up until this point?

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I have 24gb RAM on my computer and it took about 10 minutes to open one of his files that was around 95mb.

 

I'm only guessing here, but I don't think der_sed has much Autocad experience, and from what I could tell, no steps were taken to keep the file sizes down. I purged the drawing that I opened and got the file size down to about 90mb. I also ran an Audit but there were no errors found. I think the models just need to be optimized, like I mentioned, by creating blocks of repetitive components. That would be a step in the right direction.

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Im a total newbie. And my designer is also pretty amateur in Autocad.

Ill ask him to use blocks and update this thread after he applies them.

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I'd love to see an image of the drawing that topped out at 185MB. Can you provide one? Could part of the problem also be related to the level of detail being shown? For example, are you showing the threads on your 3D bolts?

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Yeah, I would like to see an image of the big file as well. Maybe I'll try to open it later when I can let Autocad sit and think about it for a while. :P

 

The file I opened did have lots of nuts and bolts and the threads were shown on the bolts, so that's probably overkill on the level of detail, depending on how this model will be used. There were also lots of springs and other things that could be optimized.

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I do not get your RAM stuff. They do not even sell computers like that. This machine has 918 GB and its 7 years old

Edited by bjenk8100
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very high potential i dont really understand the RAM you are talking about. My roomate says 17BG ram is alot. I thought it was just the c:// capacity. Then he got into ROM and all this other stuff so maybe I have no idea. If someone wants to give a brief non computer science approach to this I would be happy to absorb. I remember something years ago about 4 and 8GB of RAM as customary but I guess I did not really care or understand.

 

Tnx,

 

Brian

Edited by bjenk8100
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I do not get your RAM stuff. They do not even sell computers like that. This machine has 918 GB and its 7 years old

 

Of course they do. Here's one you can buy off the shelf with 16gb RAM at your local Best Buy. https://www.bestbuy.com/site/alienware-aurora-r6-desktop-intel-core-i7-16gb-memory-nvidia-geforce-gtx-1070-256gb-solid-state-drive-1tb-hard-drive-silver/5714687.p?skuId=5714687

 

I always have my computers custom built though, which is why I have 24gb RAM. My next computer will most likely have 32gb RAM.

 

You say you've got 918gb RAM? I think you're mistaken.

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i dont really understand the RAM you are talking about. My roomate says 17BG ram is alot. I thought it was just the c:// capacity. Then he got into ROM and all this other stuff so maybe I have no idea.

 

I think you're confusing RAM with storage space on your hard drive.

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RAM stands for Random Access Memory. It is the hard physical space available on the memory chips carried on the green plug-in cards that snap into your mother board. It's completely different from the space on your disk drives. The disk drives are where files are stored, including executable program code files. RAM is where the program instructions are actually temporarily stored and executed.

 

If the initial loading of the executable program instructions from your hard disk to RAM is SLOW, it's because there is not enough room in RAM. This makes the computer use virtual memory to compensate, which means, the program instructions are written back to the disk drive to a Swap File. This causes lots of reads and writes back and forth from virtual to RAM and back again while the program tries to execute.

 

Limited RAM not only slows down the start-up of your program, it slows down execution too.

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Found this on the Forbes website in May of this year. I doubt the average CAD tech has the money to duplicate the feat.

 

Hewlett Packard Enterprise said it has built the world's largest single-memory computing system in the world consisting of 160 terabytes (1 terabyte equals 1,000 gigabytes). For a point of (albeit unfair) comparison, the latest iPhone 7 only has 2 gigabytes of random-access memory.

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