Hello,
It's been a while since our last post on Being Civil and I hope you are still finding some of these articles useful even though some of them are seriously outdated. Throughout this year and part of last year one of the biggest issues reporting to us was regarding sudden performance degradation of Civil 3D that manifest itself by slow opening, sudden crashing, file bloating ans so on. Not every time it was because of what I am about to write about but in many cases that was the reason.
Let me give you a bit of history of the issue. The problem with performance degradation or slow file opening was first discovered earlier last year in different parts of world and then it quickly started spreading. Not sure if it was triggered by some malicious code or some updates, but it certainly has behavior of it. What happens is that the drawing database gets bigger with some duplicate entries which will eventually cause it to open slowly and make the drawing bigger and bigger to the point where it's just too much for program to operate properly. It took us quite some time to capture what happens and why it happens, what products are affected by it ans so one, but eventually several months later we were able to provide a hotfix that addressed the issue on Civil 3D 2014-2017 and backport it to 2013 as well by replacing one lose file. Here you can find the most recent version of AutoCAD Civil 3D Performance Degradation article. If you have the latest Service Packs for 2016 and 2017 then you should be all set.
However, applying this hotfix or installing Service Pack for 2016 and 2017 is just half of the story which brings to the point of this article. We received numerous reports that the issue did not go away even when hotfix was applied. Why was that? Well, there are two major reasons for that. One is that even if you applied this hotfix and fixed the drawings and if the drawings were opened and worked on un-patched version the issue will return. To prevent it all machines must be patched and all files affected must be opened, saved and closed.
Also, in one of the iterations of this article we built a script that would go through customer's file system and in the background open, save and close each file to address it. I personally did not like that approach since the drawings could have been opened in unwanted version of Civil 3D and save it like that. Other thing is that it would upgrade the date/time stamp on the drawing so you would lose some valuable information. Third reason is that if drawings fail to open, save and close this script would just skip those and move on, leaving you with notion that all files are fixed which will not be truth. Forth is that we all know that file servers tend to have huge number of drawing and some of them may be very large in size so to complete opening, saving, closing each file would take significant amount of time. On top of that we know that not every drawing is affected. So I'd suggest measured approach. If you see some issues in some particular project run it on the project (RECOVARALL may be a good command since it looks for Xrefs).
This is what must happen to address the issue:
- Apply hotfix or Service Packs on ALL machines
- Open, save, close all files that experience this issue, including xrefs. The first time you open troubled drawing on patched version it will still open slow until you save and close it. Next time it should work better.
- It is recommended to apply this on all projects you are having problem with.
See this note: "The update needs to be implemented on every user’s machine. The performance problem will return if an un-patched version of Civil 3D is used to open a file. The performance problem is fixed at the time a file is saved in the updated version of Civil 3D. The first time a user opens a file the update will not be evident. Performance will greatly improve after the first save. External references will need to be re-saved to see the benefit of the update. "
I hope this did not confuse you even more.
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