Very Slow Performance with Xrefs

I am having a lot of trouble working with this one particular drawing. I am not extremely familiar with xrefs to begin with, so if you have a suggestion for me, PLEASE keep it in mind that I don't know a whole lot about xrefs to begin with, which is exactly the reason I am here seeking help. Everything I've done so far has been based on what I have found on forums like this one and in the help section.

I am trying to do open a drawing that seems to be composed entirely of xrefs. It opens (finally) and is VERY slow to do anything. Even the movement of the cursor on the screen is slow. Is there any simple way to simply convert (?) the xref drawing to a "normal" drawing that isn't xref? It doesn't sound like this would be a difficult task, but I can't for the life of me figure out how to resolve this issue. It has caused my system to be non-responsive all around. I've had to restart my computer 5 times already today trying to work with this file.

I've attached the screenshot of the xref Manager for this drawing.

Please help.

Beef

Might it have anything to do with the path to all the drawings that are being xreffed?

BTW, what are your system specs?

Are you working off of a network or on a standalone workstation?

There are a number of things that could be causing this. Most of them have to do with stuff in the XREF files. You should go into each one of the XREFs and clean them up, i.e. audit and purge. While you're there do some investigation for things like missing linetypes fonts etc.

Before you bind the XREFs, you need to look at the future of the project.

What are the office standards?

Will you be getting updates for these XREFs?

What are you using the drawings for?

Are you making changes to the XREFs or are you drawing something else and using them as a background?

etc.

In addition to the others suggestions...

You might also detach them all and load them each one individually and detach again, then load them all one at a time and observing which one(s) may be causing the problem.

Might it have anything to do with the path to all the drawings that are being xreffed?

 

BTW, what are your system specs?

 

Are you working off of a network or on a standalone workstation?

So it turns out that the system was crashing because my RAM was not allocated properly. I got IT to fix that for me, but it's still slow when I try and work with the xref file. But to answer your question, I have included a screenshot of my specs.

The drawings are on a network. I would like to somehow create a local file that I can work from so that I can update the project folder on the network with my new drawing.

In addition to the others suggestions...

 

You might also detach them all and load them each one individually and detach again, then load them all one at a time and observing which one(s) may be causing the problem.

Yes, well one of the reasons I posted the screenshot in the original post was to show that the Detach option was not available for all the files (it is shown grayed out). So I'm not sure how to work around that. I saw this same suggestion on another help site, but somehow it doesn't apply to my situation (?) Story of my life, actually.

Please answer the questions in post #3.

Okay, so I think it was a bunch of nested xrefs. I narrowed down which drawing it was and am just working with that drawing alone since it has all the information I need anyway. This isn't really a solution to the originally stated problem and, just for the benefit of others who may be using this thread for help with a similar problem, I may return to this file when I don't have a deadline to see if all of your suggestions would fix the issue. Thank you all for your help.

There are a number of things that could be causing this. Most of them have to do with stuff in the XREF files. You should go into each one of the XREFs and clean them up, i.e. audit and purge. While you're there do some investigation for things like missing linetypes fonts etc.

 

Before you bind the XREFs, you need to look at the future of the project.

 

What are the office standards?

 

Will you be getting updates for these XREFs?

 

What are you using the drawings for?

 

Are you making changes to the XREFs or are you drawing something else and using them as a background?

 

etc.

I'm sorry I looked over this post.

I'm not sure what you mean by office standards in this context.

I don't think I will be getting updates for these XREFs, but at this point I wouldn't need any updates anyway. So I think the answer here is no.

I'm using the drawings to create a DXF cleanup (getting rid of any irrelevant information or redundant information). I'm cleaning up the drawing to only include lighting fixtures and a very basic floorplan so that it may be used by a lighting management system to more or less map the control devices (individually addressable lighting fixtures).

I am not working in conjunction with anyone on these drawings, so I think the answer to your last question is no, I'm not making changes to the XREFs. I want to make changes to the objects in the drawing, but I guess not to the XREFs themselves... I think. Like I said, I'm not very familiar with XREFs, so I hope these answers make sense.

Office standards would be what ever is set forth by the company you work for. If there are no standards, then you are the one setting them. You will need to look at what is required by the Lighting Management System in order to figure out how you should approach this. If the LMS can utilize XREFs, I would lean toward that because I am familiar with them. If not, or if you just prefer not to, feel free to continue working on the drawing that you mentioned above as long as the LMS will work with your final product. Doing a couple of simple test runs before going too far should help you figure out how to proceed. I would not want to see you "complete" the project and have it not work in the LMS.