While navigating or zooming on the Input Screen of a large-scale project, users might experience a noticeable slowdown in the speed or responsiveness of the MiTS program. The decrease in speed becomes more pronounced when dealing with projects that involve large CAD files as part of the tracing.

The term “large CAD files” here does not necessarily imply that the drawing should have visible thousands of entities within it. It can also refer to sparse-looking drawings that only consist of simple entities like points and polylines; drawings with numerous hidden entities which you can’t see unless you turn them on.

So, how can we optimize the drawing? #

The key to overcoming lagging or slowdown issues in general – a clean drawing. This involves decluttering or cleaning up the drawings by removing unnecessary or unused entities (objects, layers, blocks, etc); leaving behind smaller sized files.

In MiTS, the optimization of the drawing files can be achieved through the use of the ‘Optimize’ feature. This option is available when uploading drawings as tracing files, allowing users to efficiently clean up the CAD files, improving the performance of the software.

More technically, the optimize function removes unnecessary blocks and layers and thus freeing up memory, and also converting highly regular and numerous entities such as Points into a specific structure called Point Group. This will not only improve the snappiness of the program but also reduce the memory usage.

Outlined below are the steps, demonstrating how the mentioned feature can be utilized to reduce the size of tracing files in two occasions; (1)Uploading tracing with survey points in newly created project files and (2) uploading only the tracing files in existing project files.

Uploading tracing with survey points in newly created files #

Steps: #

1. Survey Points & Soil Infor > Click ‘Import Manage’.

2. Click ‘ACAD / TEXT / LiDAR’ > Open the selected drawing file.

3. Click ‘Optimize’ > Select layers that represent the survey points.

4. Click ‘Import’.

File Size: Before Optimize vs After Optimize #

Uploading only tracing files into existing files #

Steps: #

1. At the RHS, click on Tracing Tab > Click Load

2. Under Tracing model window, click on ‘Load’ to open the CAD file

3. Click ‘Optimize’ > Click ‘OK’

File Size: Before Optimize vs After Optimize #

Comparing the optimized drawing #

In MiTS 2: Before vs. After #

MiTS 2 vs. Civil 3D #

Additionally, the performance evaluation of an optimized drawing with over 800,000 survey points in both Civil 3D and MiTS 2 are included. It becomes evident that in MiTS 2, the operations of zooming, panning and object selection exhibit faster speed.

Zooming Operations #

Panning Operations #

Object Selection #