Comments on: The biggest DWG file I’ve ever seen

By: Daniel

Daniel — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 13:52:59 +0000

Regularly Autodesk software have problem with memory. They are often slow. I didn’t compare precisely autocad with Bentley microstation but my sense tell me Microstation is better in handling drawings.
I think it takes all needed resources at the first and after the file is opened, it is easy to handle.

By: Susan Lafleur

Susan Lafleur — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 14:19:30 +0000

Not a DWG file, but a co-worker found some AC$ (temp files) yesterday that were 1 & 2 GIG!!! The associated drawings weren’t even close to that. No wonder his computer was bogged down!

By: Dave Tee

Dave Tee — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 07:54:07 +0000

Not Autocad, but Visio…. about 15yrs ago so not so fast machines.

One of our project managers drew up a cabinet full of computer gear – switches, routers, patch panels, etc, looked so good he drew up all 68 cabinets in the equipment room, then cut and pasted them into a master drawing. Failed to notice that each drawing was already 1.5MB. Note it was cut and paste, not copy, so about two weeks work that he wasn’t able to open with his laptop.

We eventually opened it on one of our cad machines – took 45 mins to open the file.

By: Steve Johnson

Steve Johnson — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 00:18:38 +0000

Can you try opening those drawings using other releases? Other PCs? Have you tried using the Recover command to open them?

By: Eric Paskerian

Eric Paskerian — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:29:50 +0000

i am having a issue with Autocad 2009 shutting down on it own when opening large drawings. i don’t get any error message. any ideas.

By: Earl Kubaskie

Earl Kubaskie — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 02:59:10 +0000

“Nodisplay” styles in Civil 3D are your friends!

If you’ve ever seen mapping of arctic coastal areas, you know that a few square miles may contain a thousand small lakes/ponds. Back at the turn of the millenium, imports from Microstation that contained those polygons with a “fill” gave you a dwg with a few thousand flat 3D meshes, needing *many* times the memory of a closed polyline. Worse yet, his was just prior to the lightweight polyline feature’s debut.

By: the_mini_guy

the_mini_guy — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 00:06:31 +0000

Hi,
I am still green in C3D 2010, i went through the Beta testing & am only running a 32-Bit PC.
I ran a 360Mb survey (14000ha x 1km vertical) & compressed it down to 100Mb surface file (after deleting the drawing objects) then data shortcut it to a new file = 1Mb. now i can freely model away..

By: R.K. McSwain

R.K. McSwain — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 12:26:23 +0000

We have created some in the 180mb range I believe, that would not open back up. We were able to salvage them by using MAP to query in parts of it at a time.

By: Ragnar Thor Mikkelsen

Ragnar Thor Mikkelsen — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 11:20:00 +0000

I have tried to open large drawings with proxy objects in Bricscad, then save as R12, then ourge or wblock or copy paste to a new drawing.

I suppose you tried Insert, Xref, Recover.

By: daveea

daveea — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 15:29:59 +0000

over the years i’ve seen some gimongous DWG files… here are the top 5 causes for them that’ve run into and each cause had to be handled very differently:

1. a lot of content: working out in the mines where people are digging holes the size of entire cities, a mile down, and over a 10 year period, survey data gets pretty huge. these cases were handled by busting up the flat data into bite size pieces according to its use and a lot of training on polyline vertex optimization.

2. duplicate objects: crappy or careless or oblivious CAD work, these cases were handled with custom duplicate entity removal routines and a lot of training on duplicate entity prevention and detection.

3. cheap raster-to-vector polylines from hell: horrible or incorrect settings and conversion routines which created contours using polylines with billions of unnecessary vertices. these cases were solved with custom polyline weeding routines and training on raster-to-vector software configuration.

4. 3rd-party/other CAD proxy objects: it’s amazing how much junk a 3rd party app or an alternative CAD program can add to a simple drawing. these cases were handled by source investigation, hacking, and by uding AUDIT, WBLOCK, DXF search/replace and other elegant junk data stripping tools when the plots were verified as the only data really necessary for keeping.

5. exploded entities: these weren’t duplicates, they were just mishandled native entities — hatch patterns probably being the world culprit. thank god most of these cases were organized by layer and deletable/re-doablk.

By: ralphg

ralphg — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 15:04:02 +0000

I wonder if AutoCAD’s problem is due to the size or due to the content of the drawing?

AutoCAD 2010 is supposed to handle drawings with larger amounts of content.

By: Chris Cowgill

Chris Cowgill — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 11:23:42 +0000

About 5 years ago, I reduced a drawing that was 304 mb down to about 3 1/2 mb mostly by removing duplicate objects. It was a map, that had about 3 or 4 copies of the linework on top of itself. I dont quite know how long it took to clean it up, but I do know I used the express tool Overkill to remove the duplicate linework.