Just hit 500 layers in a single AutoCAD file and my computer didn't crash

I was working on a huge site plan for a new park in Portland, and the civil engineer kept adding new detail sets. I looked at the layer manager today and it said 500. My old workstation from 2018 would have frozen at 300. This matters because it means I can keep everything in one master file instead of splitting it, which cuts down on xref errors. Has anyone else pushed their setup this far on a recent project?

3 comments

3 Comments

dylan4133mo ago

Honestly that's wild. My old firm would have split that into like ten different files by now. Keeping it all together sounds like a dream for coordination, even if the layer manager becomes a nightmare to scroll through. What kind of rig are you running to handle that?

oliver_ward1427d ago

Twenty files for one detail sounds like its own kind of nightmare honestly. I've seen setups where people end up with a master file that references a dozen others and one broken link brings the whole thing down. RAM is probably the real hero here, I run 32GB and even then I'm purging unused layers every hour like a ritual. Guess it depends on whether you'd rather scroll forever or hunt through folders forever.

finley_flores283mo ago

Yeah the layer manager scroll is real, I mean you just have to get religious about naming groups and using colors. My old place was the same with splitting everything up and it just made finding stuff take forever. I'm on a pretty basic setup honestly, just a lot of ram and keeping the history states low. It's not perfect but it beats opening twenty files to check one detail.