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massive file size


michael john williams

Question

What makes a file size increase dramatically from 19,436 kb to 203,210 kb? 

 

The drawings are only of a house with extensions. A few 3Ds are included in render works - medium detail, open GL background render and hidden line foreground render in sketch.  Also there is a couple of small size pdfs. But no 3D cars, trees or people etc. So I don't why the file size was 19 MB in the first place and then with a few minor revisions jumped up to 203 MB.

 

To reduce file size I have deleted the 2 pdf imports but to no avail the file size remains ate 19 MB.

 

Any suggestions?

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

@michael john williams Are you using VW2021?  In the Document Preferences there is a new feature called 'Save VGM Cache'.  This is on by default and can cause the file size to increase.  Turning that cache off should help to reduce the file size but will make file opening and navigating slower.  I hope that helps.

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Guest Alex Sagatov

If purge didn't have a large impact, that would indicate that the file size is coming from something in use in the file (and not resources that are lingering in the file).

 

Between the time it went from 19MB to ~200MB, what exactly did you do? Do you add a bunch of furniture/resources? Did you create a bunch of sheet layers?

 

A file size bump like this normally boils down to:

1) Purging

2) Imported Resources (such as 3DS, Sketchup, or OBJ files)

3) Viewport Cache

 

That being said, it could be caused by a lot of different things. If you can direct message me a copy of the file, I can dig into it a bit if you like.

 

(As a side note: As Pat mentions, 19MB isn't that big for a Vectorworks file. It will depend drastically on how you are modeling in the program. I have some finished projects that are only a few MBs while others are hundreds of MBs.)

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Hi-

 

I had a similar problem last year, (12Mb vwx went to 60MB pdf). Turned out that publish to pdf had an option to rasterize text -

For each sheet that is published, select options next to the 'Publish to pdf' , and try the opposite of what your default is.

That seemed to do the trick for me. (in 2020 - can't select all sheets, need to do it one at a time)

 

Tali

Edited by taliho
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Thanks for your advice Alex and Taliho.

 

I don't recall doing anything major between the massive change in file size. No imported resources. No 3D furniture or resources [if I did presumably the purge deletes any unused unused resources?]I did spend a lot of time on rendering the 3D viewports but having said that the rendering is not in final quality renderworks or set to detail. Alex, thank you for the offer to send you the file. Bearing in mind the file size, I will try and send you the purged [slightly reduced] file.

 

Regarding pdfs there were two imported pdfs in the file. I deleted the pdfs but that made little difference to the file size.

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7 minutes ago, Alex Sagatov said:

@michael john williamsI'm not entirely sure how you got this result 🙃, but this appears to be the issue in the file in question.

[...]

There are 187,680 North Arrow Objects stacked directly on top of each other.

That's an almost reverse deja vu. One issue I had in the past was that using the command undo once through a keyboard shortcut caused VW to use the max number of undo steps as if it got in a loop and wipe out quite a bit of work. Perhaps something similar may have happened when copypasting a north arrow through a keyboard shortcut and VW thinking the command was issued multiple times and got in a loop and kept duplicating in place until interrupted by something else? Especially on a fast computer it could cause a lot of duplicates in a really short time.

 

Of course there is always the residential cat to blame for walking on the keyboard and cause havoc.🙂

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Guest Alex Sagatov
1 minute ago, Art V said:

That's an almost reverse deja vu. One issue I had in the past was that using the command undo once through a keyboard shortcut caused VW to use the max number of undo steps as if it got in a loop and wipe out quite a bit of work. Perhaps something similar may have happened when copypasting a north arrow through a keyboard shortcut and VW thinking the command was issued multiple times and got in a loop and kept duplicating in place until interrupted by something else? Especially on a fast computer it could cause a lot of duplicates in a really short time.

 

Of course there is always the residential cat to blame for walking on the keyboard and cause havoc.🙂

 

@Art VAh! I'm very familiar with issues related to undo as you are mentioning here. In the past, there were some menu commands and specific workflows that would trip the undo system. Back in 2015-2018, I know I personally submitted a handful of ones I found when working with customers. --- As far as I know, all causes of this that we are aware of have been addressed; however, if you are still running into this with 2020/2021, please let me know and I'll see if there is anything we can track down.Based on my understanding of the undo issue being described, this is definitely something else; however, it might be caused by something of a similar nature.

 

(If you are still running into this, lets start a new topic/direct message since it is separate from the topic at hand.)

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@michael john williams save a copy of your file and delete those rendered viewports/sheets, purge and save to see if that is the culprit.

@Alex Sagatov points out the duplication of objects, that is a good thing to check out as well.

 

In other news, I routinely operate with files exceeding 1 GB in size and do not experience a slow down on my computer.  Perhaps your software and/or graphics card settings are not optimized.

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Sorry for my late reply....been sleeping on it in the UK. Nice to wake up to a solution!

 

I feel really stupid.......how can I get the North point to duplicate so may times! It took a while to delete it. Select and delete did not work. Put Vectorworks into not responding and crashed. Purge command did the trick with duplicate objects selected. File size now down to 5 MB and workable.

 

Thanks for all you help.

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