treedepth and treemax and ram

I'm looking to squeeze every little bit of extra performance out of our
systems. I have read the help menu about treedepth, and I can't say I fully
understand it. I do understand that a negative value works well for 2d
drawings in that it cuases autocad to ignore the z value. However, this
won't always work for our office. Instead it appears that the higher the
treedepth value is set, the more optimally autocad makes use of available
ram. So my question (assuming the my premise is correct) is how do I
calculate the optimal tree depth? All the machines in our office are
configured with 1 gig of ram, so I'm not concerned about inequality between
machines. Also, I don't get the nomenclature; the first three numbers
correspond to model space, and the last two correspond to paper space. The
largest possible value should be 99999? default is 3020.

any insight would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Fred Hopkins

 

Fred,

i haven't been able to find any documentation otherwise that indicated how much these settings still affect anything. Yet the settings we've used for several versions reflect that the most pressing computations occur in paperspace, as one would assume that there may be many viewports showing over 100% of model space, and there may very well be additional blocks of details and such.
anyway, i've never seen a drawing break with setting of "3099". note the 99 for paperspace, which is supposedly a theoretical maximum.

--Jeremiah

 

I infer from your email that these settings may not be used in current
autocad versions. 3099 is not the default by the way, 3020 is the default,
and I will try your suggestion.

Has anyone tried 99999?

much these settings still affect anything. Yet the settings we've used for
several versions reflect that the most pressing computations occur in
paperspace, as one would assume that there may be many viewports showing
over 100% of model space, and there may very well be additional blocks of
details and such.

99 for paperspace, which is supposedly a theoretical maximum.

 

Wow I once knew this info but have not had to worry about it for years with the new machines from at least 4 years ago. And it sounds like you have better than what I use now. We were working, and still do at times, with file that got up to 40-50 meg plus. It will take you just a little research in a good cad book to find what you need. That is all I did. Would love to help you out but I just cannot recall. Only posted cause I am very surprised anyone needs to worry about this these days. What kind of drawings are you doing that cause this concern?

 

That was my biggest problem. 50 meg file (pre-paper space layout tabs) and 20-30 open viewports for the various drawings. This was a project site underground mechanical piping layout. All the work was done in 3D and needed to be done in the same file. I could have made separate files for the layouts and xrefed the main drawing in. But I hated having that much trouble when plotting. worked well. But yeah those values made the regens a little smoother when in paper space. Still had to turn a bunch of viewports off.

 

Acutally, our drawings aren't that big, I was just generating a template
file with all system variables set correctly and came upon this setting. I
just thought it might make sense to take advantage of all the ram we have
these days..

with the new machines from at least 4 years ago. And it sounds like you have
better than what I use now. We were working, and still do at times, with
file that got up to 40-50 meg plus. It will take you just a little research
in a good cad book to find what you need. That is all I did. Would love to
help you out but I just cannot recall. Only posted cause I am very surprised
anyone needs to worry about this these days. What kind of drawings are you
doing that cause this concern?

 

we originally came up with these settings on a 20 meg drawing in R12 Windows (yes, we were using R12 windows!), that would repeatedly crash when attempting to display paperspace. we'd reboot, change the treemax setting, and try to open the drawing again. i finally starting experimenting with the paperspace setting, assuming that the paperspace needs would be much greater than model space, so rather than 3020, i bumped it to 4099.
after clearing that hurdle, we reduced it to 3099, and have had it set as such since R12W, with never a drawing running out of memory or crashing. (but i should note, these have always only been 2D working drawings, never 3D).

--Jeremiah