Handling large XREFs

[spittle]

I'm working on a couple of drawings made up mainly of 5 XREFs, each averaging between 20 & 30 MB. The drawings using these XREFs are taking an age to open and they keep freezing on me whilst working on them, often for around 3-8 minutes at a time.

 

The scales have been reset throughout.

The drawings and XREFs are saved on a network and in Task manager the network usage goes up into the 80s (%) whilst AutoCAD has frozen then it drops back down again when it's back up and running again.

There are no messages that pop up when opening the XREFs individually.

Purge has been run throughout.

 

I'm assuming my problems are down to the large size of the XREFS.

 

It really is becoming unmanageable.

 

Any ideas?

 

the XREFs just contain the background (OS) of a huge area around Gloucester either size of a proposed pipeline and they are all in DWG format.

 

Using

2x Xeon Quad 2.6GHz

8GB

Quadro FX 3700 512MB

[Tiger]

Hav you purged/audited the files? are they 3D? Can you make them 2D?

[spittle]

All is purged, they're not 3D either.

[NBC]

Would it be useful to XCLIP the xref's ?

Sometimes that can help with speed issues.

[Tiger]

It could help to have them on the local computer instead of the network as well, if that's possible.

[NBC]

and / or also you may wish to visit the link below for a different solution:

http://discussion.autodesk.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=579776

[lpseifert]

Try enabling Demand Loading and/or using Xclip.

[spittle]

The Xref's are clipped where I can, will explore the other suggestions too.

 

Thought about saving locally but would like to avoid that if poss as other people are working on drawings using the XREFs. they shouldn't really be chaging but I've made a few adjustments on them.

[spittle]

And it's not an issue with scales, they are all down to a minimum.

[wannabe]

Do you need to be able to measure or snap to any of the entities in the xref?