Saturday, March 18, 2006

Use INDEXCTL and speed up your AutoCAD

I was scanning through the Autodesk newsgroups and found this post about Slow performance with clipped xrefs and though I could help.
"We are having performance issues with drawings that have multiple copies of an xref that is clipped in various ways. ... AutoCAD slows down substantially as the number of copies of the clipped xref increases, to the point that it can take 40-50 seconds to change tabs. It seems that the regeneration of the paperspace tabs is the problem because once they are cached switching is almost instant."
Here was my suggestion: Using INDEXCTL set to 3 can improve the performance up to 10 times I have seen, especially in combination with xrefs, xclip and viewports.
"INDEXCTL seems to do the trick!!Dropped tab swapping times from 40-50 seconds to only 4-5 seconds.This is a life saver... thanks guys."
The Autodesk User to User Discussion Groups are a valuable asset. Another one is AUGI Forums.

1 comment:

  1. I believe that for this to work best, you need to do the following:

    In your big xrefs, set INDEXCTL to 2 so they will save indexes of their layers and locations (spatial). In all other drawings, set INDEXCTL to 0.

    In your referencing drawings, set XLOADCTL to 2 so they only will load the parts (spatial and layer) of the index they need.

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