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I read an interesting article about: Is Drawing Regen Slow? If you’ve worked in some larger AutoCAD drawing files in some of the more recent releases, you may have come across a message in your Status Bar saying “Scanning the Drawing” while your drawing takes an unusually long time updating. The Progress Bar that coincides with this message may take several seconds or even minutes to complete. Now whether this shows up due to panning or zooming in a drawing containing a large background image or if you are modeling a large corridor in Civil 3D, the result is the same. You get a progress bar and the message “Scanning the Drawing.” So why is this happening and how can you speed up your process? Well the reason this happens is because you probably have several hundred or even thousands of Layers in your drawing and/or several Layer Filters which are compounding the issue further. When working on any operations in AutoCAD (or any of the vertical products such as Civil 3D or AutoCAD Architecture) that require an “update” of the view within model or paper space, the program will attempt to reload and recalibrate all of these layers and filters in the drawing. So that was the “why” this is happening, so now let’s explore the “how” to resolve the issue. The over abundance of layers and filters is the cause, but you likely don’t want to go sifting through your CAD Standards and start paring down layer names. That would be absurd. However, there is a simple way to control how AutoCAD handles this process. Within AutoCAD there is a system variable called SHOWLAYERUSAGE. By setting SHOWLAYERUSAGE to “0″ (zero), the program will stop trying to reprocess all the layers and filters every time you zoom, pan, regen, or any other “update” process. A simple solution to a very annoying problem