Strange Drawing Corruption

Hello All,

I am working with some files that are increadibly slow to save, plot/publish, and switch layouts. It can literally take ten minutes to do these commands some times. There are a lot of blocks in these files. Some have dynamic blocks others do not. Every time i open the file and audit/purge there are several thousand "bad blocks" and a few unreferenced applications. The file sizes are anywhere from 1800kb to 5000kb, and I am running on Windows XP pro w/ service pack 3. Pentium 4 2.80 GHz and 1.99 GB of ram. The files are saved on our network, but even when i save them and open them locally i have issues. Unfortunately I do not have authorization to post these files here. If anyone has any clue as to how to fix these files, it would be infinitely appreciated.

Thanks!

Do any of them have xrefs attached?

Could part of the problem be bloated scalelists?

Can you add any more RAM (another GB or two)?

The only X-ref is our title block (which does not cause problems on other files), and my audit/purge command resets the scale lists as well. I doubt i can convince my IT guy to get more RAM I badgered him for three months to get up to 2 from 1.5

have you tried wblock the file out? Also try inserting into a blank file. Sometimes it works - can't always see way they bloat.

Tell your iT guy the company has a choice. You can spend more time than you have to manipulating large drawing file sizes (thus costing the company/client more money) or he can add more RAM. Which do you think will be cheaper in the long run?

have you tried wblock the file out? Also try inserting into a blank file. Sometimes it works - can't always see way they bloat.

This usually works for me, also. As the company IT guy, it's the first thing I tell them whenever we run into a problem drawing.

Another thing you might want to look at is annotative text... if you have it and don't need it, get rid of it. It always slows things down considerably.

Also, as the company IT guy, I know that it's not always possible to spend $100 on more RAM, no matter how much sense it makes.

It's not always possible to spend $100 on RAM because we see it as a direct cost. Open wallet...$$$ fly out. Yet, if even one user has to spend upwards of 15 minutes of each work day waiting for something to happen that is lost productivity.

Let's take our fictional CAD user and say his billing rate is $50 an hour. He loses a quarter of an hour each day. That's $12.50. Multiple that times 5 days. That's $62.50 a week. Now multiply that by 50 weeks (we'll give him/her 2 weeks off for good behavior) and we have a total cost to the company of $3,125.00. But that is a hidden cost because nobody really "sees" it. The company saved $100 in direct costs but lost $3,125 in hidden costs associated with non-productivity. It shouldn't take the average beancounter too long to figure out where true savings can be had. Even after adding in the downtime to install the memory and the cost of the tech's time the total cost will come nowhere near $3,125.

These kinds of senarios come to light every day. Ex. - Don't buy that $300 symbol library. Build one yourself at ??? dollars per hour over the period of a few days or a couple of weeks. Look at the money we saved! Yeah, right.

Thanks guys, great suggestions! I am going to try Wblocking the drawing out - the only issue i have with this is redoing all our title blocks. Is there a way to wblock or export those as well? They all have specific layers turned on and off or set to different colors to show specific info only.

I have been over the math with them, it all seems to be falling on deaf ears . All the higher ups in my company do not seem the types to take advice from someone half their age (or perhaps just too busy).

I tried to make this point to our IT manager many times. I collected real-world data from the user who needed the upgrade, over the course of two weeks. He had about 3 minutes wasted each time he opened AutoCAD and about 1 minute wasted per drawing. He averaged just over two crashes a day, so that's 4 minutes each time, plus the 7.5 minutes of redone work (his autosave was set to 15 mins) each time. By my reckoning, the RAM would have paid for itself twice over in the first month.

Know what my answer came back as?

"Change his autosave interval to save more often."

Those are the kinds of responses our IT manager is giving our IT guy. The IT guy realizes that we are wasting money on these big files - I am not the only one affected but his boss seems to brush it off.