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XREFs Taking Forever


Bill Tillman

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Doing a job for a client and we're using the Architectural drawings to speed things up. However, speed is the last thing we're getting. We are loading the XREF's are not that large, about 3-5 MB each. But they have nested XREF's inside of them and blocks and on and on. What I'm finding is that as we use them it takes anywhere from 30-40 seconds or sometime even longer to load them and since there are a dozen or more of these in each file, the time delay adds up over an eight hour day. And in my case, 12 hour days. So can anyone offer advice on how to speed this process up? Is binding the only option to get this organized.

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There was another post trying to remember and basicly the xrefs were a disaster multiple cross linked full of junk and stuff not used. It ceased to load on my pc at home. I think the basic suggestions was purge overkill and remove any junk form each xref. maybe also try to remove cross linked xrefs inside xrefs.

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Sounds like it is searching for something, like BIGAL, might need all relevant drawings cleaned up.

 

Could be a network problem, I've seen some firewall software that caused a long wait time for xrefs. Is everything in the same folder?

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I routinely receive files that are 20mb to 50mb. These files can sometimes take several minutes to open, but after I clean them, they get reduced to less than 1mb and they open within just a few seconds. My cleaning process involves using the WBLOCK command to save the drawing out to a new file. This strips out all the garbage and leaves me with a clean file. Just make sure you're in model space and your UCS is set to World, then run the WBLOCK command and choose the "Entire Drawing" option.

 

I would also detach all the nested xrefs and load them into my drawing individually.

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I routinely receive files that are 20mb to 50mb. These files can sometimes take several minutes to open, but after I clean them, they get reduced to less than 1mb and they open within just a few seconds. My cleaning process involves using the WBLOCK command to save the drawing out to a new file. This strips out all the garbage and leaves me with a clean file. Just make sure you're in model space and your UCS is set to World, then run the WBLOCK command and choose the "Entire Drawing" option.

 

I would also detach all the nested xrefs and load them into my drawing individually.

I do a clean up as well but I purge everything I don't need like objects just as furniture blocks, demo layers, so on a so forth. Depending on the file size it averages to about a hour of clean up time. You would most likely see a decrease in load time if you could do something like that.

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Thanks for the advice guys. Now to convince the boss and the client's to let us take the time to clean up the drawings before we start working....who said that? We don't have time to clean up drawings. Just make it work and get on with it. Besides, you guys have AutoCAD, it should only take you 5 minutes to do it.....I think we all know the routine.

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Thanks for the advice guys. Now to convince the boss and the client's to let us take the time to clean up the drawings before we start working....who said that? We don't have time to clean up drawings. Just make it work and get on with it. Besides, you guys have AutoCAD, it should only take you 5 minutes to do it.....I think we all know the routine.

 

My method of running the WBLOCK command only takes a few minutes, and that includes waiting for the bloated file to open. I think what Ski_Me is talking about is going through the drawing and manually deleting and purging out things he doesn't need. I don't do that. I never delete anything from the original file. I just save out a clean version, minus all the garbage.

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Shouldn't take that long, most cleanup could most likely be done with a Batch and a Script or two.

 

This was happening to some engineers here when opening P&IDs and other drawings with Xrefs (our IT loves to change paths on the network for no reason), I added the folders with all the Xrefs to the support file search path and they opened immediately.

 

It may be hunting for an Xref that wasn't supplied.

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