Delayed opening times for Civil3D drawing
Introduction
Recently a customer called in and ask if we can look at a Civil3D drawing for them as it takes more than 5 minutes to open on their side.
Investigation
After receiving the drawing, I opened it on my laptop and it took 1 minute 27 seconds to open.
Once opened the drawing performed fast and as expected.
Discovery Process:
- To do some maintenance and investigating to what the issue might be I started the process by doing an Audit on the drawing. The Audit command found no errors.
- I then select the Erase command and typed All and enter. This selected 4088 objects with 30 in the Layouts. This left 4058 objects in Modelspace. I then removed the visible drawing in Modelspace by means of holding in the Shift key and windowing over the drawing to remove the entities from the selection. This process removed 4050 items, 8 were selected, which I deleted.
- I also checked that the AutoCAD System only Regens the layout upon opening and not all at the start. In the past any other option slowed the drawing down. The setting was as expected.
- Lastly I looked in the Prospector and found that some Point Group entries do not contain any points. I deleted the 3 entries which did not contain any points.
I then saved the drawing and reopened it to test.
Result
It now opened in 13 seconds.
Conclusion
After speaking to the client and confirming their workflow we found that these Point Group entries are initially used to link to the database to import information and then thereafter the information is inserted in the drawing and the link to the database is not used anymore. However the empty Point Group entries remained in the Prospector. This is the reason for the delayed in opening. The orphaned entries are looking for the database and cannot find it and then ‘times out’, delaying the opening of the drawing. Once these empty entries had been deleted it sped up the opening of the drawing.
