Civil 3d 2007 file size 1

[1inchgroup]

Let's say I was working on a drawing (on my desktop), saved it back to the office server at the end of the day, then reopened it the next morning.

Let's pretend there is a difference in file size from the copy on my desktop and the copy on the server. A massive difference. The file on my desktop weighs in at just over 18MB, the file on the server was just over 40MB. Civil 3d begins to choke on drawings at around this point. 50MB and it's close to unusable.

Visually the drawings are the same, a purge/audit routine reveals no differences (blocks, text, layers...etc...). Overkill reveals no multiple copies of items...

I checked with people in the office that may have been working on the file to make sure I wasn't going to delete anything they needed. I'm the only one that has been in the file.

I've got 2 photos linked to the dwg but those are the only external connections. The surface is fairly small, and is a typical river/bank topo.

We do have gremlins that seem to change things in drawings overnight, (for example) I've seen drawings in the office with 2000 tiny donuts all in one spot, tucked away in one of the corners on an off layer...but Overkill should catch that...

What could cause such a large difference in file sizes?

 

[CarlAK]

Some suggestions..

did you run "-purge" (on the command line) and delete registered applications?
-did you delete Named Layer Filters (depending on version, may need a lisp routine to do this, 2006 and later you can do with the FILTERS command).

These items can bloat vanilla AutoCAD drawings, there may be other things that can affect C3D drawings.

 

[1inchgroup]

I'm a command line junky, started with release 12...one of the many things I don't like about the Civil3D program is them trying to take away my command line.

Yeah, I ran a purge and audited both files. Is there a difference between "purge" and "-purge"? If so, I have not used the -purge function yet.

Thanks for the reply,

 

[1inchgroup]

I see "-purge" runs the command from the command line like it used to be...same result. No extra items.

Added a 947 foot long polyline to the drawing this morning and it added 7MB to the file size. Something is definately off with this DWG file...

Any ideas?

 

[CarlAK]

Definitely something amiss there, have no idea...

It may be different with Civil3D, but in Plain AutoCAD, using "-purge" gives you the additional option to delete Registered Applications. If you type "All" for this "-purge", I believe it does not delete RegApps.

-Did you delete Layer Filters? If not, a few lisps have been posted in older forum topics.

 

[1inchgroup]

I ended up redoing the task in LDD, and importing the surface from that to Civil 3d to make it work. I'm back down to around 10Megs on file size now. What's the point though, really. I could have had this done days ago using LDD by itself.

This program feels like a Beta release, at best. If you're thinking about upgrading, I'd wait for a few more service packs first. IMHO, we jumped the gun.

Also be aware that you'll need an actual Graphics Workstation, or an expensive gaming machine to run this beast effectively. It's a memory hog and a half...I can't imagine how well it'll run under Vista. It chokes my machine at work many times a day if I'm doing anything more involved than changing mtext.

The demo runs just fine on my machine at home, but then again I've got a 6ghz equivalent dual processor, and SLI configured graphics cards with 256meg each...good luck running this with your average Dell word processor.