John Mayo, PE, a fellow Autodesk Expert Elite member, has discovered a white paper from Autodesk with a link to what we can only describe as an unofficial Performance Enhancement for Civil 3D, versions 2014-2017.
For Civil 3D 2014 and 2015, this fix is not in a Hotfix, not available via the Autodesk Desktop App, not part of a Service Pack, and it’s not been announced anywhere that we are aware of but it was published on Sep 23, 2016 here. What we can say is that it works as advertised, to reduce drawing load and save times. We have noticed that in Civil 3D 2014, an empty C3D drawing would be over 1MB in file size and take up to 30 seconds to open. After applying this fix, subsequent saves of the file drop the file size to approximately 350k and the file opens in about 2 seconds.
Special thanks to another fellow Autodesk Expert Elite, Jeff Mishler for helping us diagnose and test some files side by side. Jeff pointed us to John’s find yesterday and testing so far is showing great promise. We will report back with further results as they become clear.
Note: For Civil 3D 2016, this fix is included in SP3. For Civil 3D 2017, the fix is included in SP1.1
Updated Sep 23, 2016
I understand all files need to be converted (opened and saved)once the SP is installed, otherwise the problem persists because the data is still in the files?
That would be correct Bill.