Missing .shx and .shp files in xref slows Civil3d performance, causes slow starts an more

At the start of the year I had a job that just caused Civil3d to preform like a dog, I started a blog post then that I never finished until today, when I encountered the same drop in performance.

At the beginning of the year when opening a file it appeared to stall on “finding interior borders”. Today i was having slow regen’s and slow jumping between model space and layouts and constant Civil3d (not responding) prompts.

It turned out that both these issues in performance were the result of missing .shx and or .shp files in the base survey xref from a sub consultant.

To find the issue the first time i spent most of a morning troubleshooting the situation trying the following:-

1. Auditing for errors
2. Purging all the unused stuff
3. Detached all xrefs
4. Promoted the Drefs
5. Closing the drawing on model so as to not regen when in a Layout on opening
6. Saving the file to c drive rather than a network drive.

It seemed the only noticeable improvement occurred with the xref’s detached.

On opening the Xref itself i noticed in the command line that 3 or 4 .shp files were not being found. Using the lsp findshp I found the lines using the shp files and swapped them out.

Today the issue was the same but missing .shx files. To fix it this time I requested the missing files from the subconsultant and installed them as discussed here http://advsurveying.com/advcad/?p=180

Hope this saves some of you from the dreaded (not responding) prompt one day.

Polyline Global Width

Reminder for me if someone has changed the global width in a drawing all the new plines will draw at that width set the PLINEWID variable to 0
to go back to a default width of 0.

Learn Acronyms and become a keyboard Wizard

There is nothing I hate more than the time wasted moving the mouse to click a button. So I am a great believe in the power of the keyboard. To harness this power I use a lot of 1 to 3 letter acronym’s to trigger commands. I remember these by quoting the command to myself each time trigger it and having the acronym made up of the first letter in each word that makes up the command name so for example the command QuickEditFeatureElevs would be QFE. There are a number
of possible combinations using the 26 letters in the alphabet there are in fact:-
where n = number of letters in the alphabet
k =length of the acronym
Number 1 Letter combinations

Number 2 Letter combinations

Number 3 Letter combinations

Therefore there’s 2951 lets say 3000 between friends 1 to 3 letter acronym’s that’s quite a few commands you can trigger from the keyboard. To add acronym’s commands you need to create a list of alias commands for the longer commands to do this :-
Open the acad.pgp file by selecting the following from the menus Tools->Customize->Edit Program Parameters(acad.pgp) or typing (startapp "notepad" (findfile "acad.pgp")) at the command line.
Scroll to the end of the file and add the user defined commands alias you want here is an example of the what is in my pgp file

Save and close the acad.pgp file and type reinit at the commandline and reload the .pgp file. Your alias acronym’s will be available.