Topic: AutoCAD Performance with Ceratin entities

[Shade]

In my office we use a lot of dynamic blocks, wipeouts, solid hatches, fields, viewports, etc. in our drawings.
I was wonder what effects dynamic blocks have on performance as compared to non dynamic blocks.
Are solid hatches better for masking then wipeouts?
Do wipeouts hinder drawing performance?
Do fields hinder performance?
Do the number of viewports in a drawings reduce speed?
Do the number of xrefs reduce speed?
Does annotative text reduce speed?

In the end, I would like to know if certain drawing techniques that we practice in our office are causing more head aches then they our worth?  Some drawings take a considerable amount of time to regen, plot, open, etc. and we would like to reduce this.

Right now we are trying to speed up the performance in some of the large drawings by splitting the information contained in them up and xrefing only what is needed, but this too has lead to other issues.

What are some of the swamps techniques to speed up drawing performance?

Any advice would be appreciated.
Thank you
Shades 

[Rob...]

Hardware is the best way to speed up performance. A good video card is probably the first step to increasing performance. A low end or malfunctioning one will bring a drawing to a grinding halt. On a good computer, none of the items listed will affect performance enough to be noticeable by the user. Obviously the more you have of anything, the more they are going to have an affect. I cannot speak as to the actual affect each object in itself has on performance but I will try to explain my thoughts on this.

In general the more functionality an object has, the more it can affect performance.

Simple blocks have little affect. In fact, if you explode them there will be a performance hit. Dynamic blocks can have a lot of functionality, so they slow things down.

I avoid wipeouts.

Hatches affect performance. The more complex the hatch the bigger the hit.

Fields have a larger impact than plain text. They pull data from someplace.

Viewports do a lot so they have an affect. Non-rectangular shaped ones, even more so.

XREFs, used properly, speed up performance. (They can also bring a drawing do a grinding stop if there are problems in the XREF file.)

Annotative text, I am not sure about. My guess is it can go either way, depending on how you use it. If you use it extensively for multiple scales, I would guess that it can speed things up as compared to alternative ways of accomplishing the same thing.

I think the best way to get definitive answers to your performance problems is to have someone examine a typical drawing that exhibits the slow behavior you are trying to avoid.

[ChrisCarlson]

If you are looking for a solid performance boost, invest in a proper workstation video card. Our pre-configured computers from HP came with standard gaming or desktop video cards, pretty much everything in AutoCAD was laggy. Upgraded to workstation cards and saw a noticeable increase in performance.

On the plotting issue, look into plotter specific drivers. We have a KIP and the standard drivers from AutoCAD are horrible took on average over a minute to open plot dialogs, plotter settings, page sizes, etc.

[dgorsman]

AutoCAD doesn't make good use of workstation cards.  There are sufficient users with gaming cards that get good results to satisfy my curiosity on the subject.

I'll also have to argue (indirectly) against hardware being the best way to speed up performance.  There are diminishing returns: as more and more money is spent there is less and less of an improvement.  A $10k computer will not compensate for poor management of drawing content, failing to purge, using blocks downloaded from the internet without any cleaning, failing to control inherited annotation scales, or working against the designed workflow of a vertical product.  The first line of defense against poor performance is a good work process.

[Rob...]

I agree but I was talking from the point of view that if the computers/network were not up to spec, or even borderline, and all is well with the workflow, there can still be performance issues.

We really need more info from the OP.

[Rob...]

If you are looking for a solid performance boost, invest in a proper workstation video card. Our pre-configured computers from HP came with standard gaming or desktop video cards, pretty much everything in AutoCAD was laggy. Upgraded to workstation cards and saw a noticeable increase in performance.

Newer high end gaming cards are outperforming workstation cards dollar for dollar.

[RC]

  A $10k computer will not compensate for poor management of drawing content, failing to purge, using blocks downloaded from the internet without any cleaning, failing to control inherited annotation scales, or working against the designed workflow of a vertical product.  The first line of defense against poor performance is a good work process.

Coming from the time of 8088 processors at a blinding speed of 8 Mhz (yes that's an M) with 640K RAM (yes that's a K) I have a completely different perspective.  Even then the machine was faster than the was the development of the design.  Then as now there is MUCH about the development of the design that has NOTHING at all to do with the speed of the application (hardware or software).  The actual mechanics of building that design in the application is less than a third of the entire design, so even a 10% increase in that performance is less than a 3% increase in total performance.

Yes I regularly 'housekeep' my files but that is more of just my tendencies than it is any real gain in performance.  ALL the gains (nano-seconds) made in performance all day long by such housekeeping chores can be offset completely by a simple wrong number phone call.  The 'aggravation factor' might be more noticeable when that file takes an extra second and half to open or save, but is that 9 seconds an hour any real productivity gain??  It might be if you spend 10 minutes b1tch1ing about the slow machine, but otherwise not really.  A slower machine (hardware) will be impacted greater by such housekeeping, but a much faster machine  would be impacted to a much lesser degree, to the point where it makes much less difference. 

The difference between a low-end off-the-shelf graphics card and a high-end gaming card is substantial and can MORE than offset ANY gains made by good housekeeping.  Of course with BOTH cards good housekeeping will improve performance but it is much more critical and noticeable with the lower end card.

As for components used in the model itself … we’re quite used to 4-10MB dwg files with 2 MB being a ‘small-ish’ model, and we’re running 64x Dell T3600’s quad-core with Xeon E5 at 3.6Ghz and a midline NVIDIA Quadro 2000 graphics card.  The components we use make little difference in performance and nothing placed in the model is sufficiently ‘uncomfortable’ to avoid using it.

but that's just me

[Rob...]

Oh yeah, housekeeping. We have low to midrange workstations. Not too long ago I saw a couple of machines at work with thousands of temp files in just one location speed up significantly after deleting them.

[RC]

Oh yeah, housekeeping. We have low to midrange workstations. Not too long ago I saw a couple of machines at work with thousands of temp files in just one location speed up significantly after deleting them.

Well there is another point about performance, there are several OTHER issues that have more to do with performance that the components used in the file and one of them is housekeeping for temp files and graphics caches and hard-drives loaded with 150,000 tunes and 120GB of soft-porn.

True story, 1TB hard-drive with 550GB of music, 120GB of girls in bikinis, 140GB of autosave cr4p, and 100GB of 'temp trash'.  And the guy was complaining AutoCAD was a POS cad software because it was so slow.  He complained so much I volunteered to help speed him up, so after hours I dumped his music and soft porn, dumped all his temp cr4p, swept his drive of anything not issued by the company cleaned up and defragged everything.  The next morning he was ecstatic over how blindingly fast his machine became overnight, about ten minutes later he wanted to know where all his music went and I said the same place his porn went ... 

BTW, we have recently had issues with AutoCAD expanding a graphics cache directory to the point of being an issue.   When cleaning up be sure to check
a user's AppData\Local\Autodesk\AutoCAD 2013 - English\R19.0\enu\GraphicsCache (or whichever version you might be using beyond 2013)

[ronjonp]

IMO ... If your workstations have primary drives that are spinny, there's the first problem you could fix to increase performance.

[Rob...]

Actually, the next round of machines is gonna be SSD. It will be my first time on one unless I upgrade at home before then.