Identifying root cause of FreeCAD file size bloat
Identifying root cause of FreeCAD file size bloat
This article will show you how to find out exactly which layer is causing your FreeCAD file to balloon in size, by getting a granular list of all of the layers in your document tree, sorted by size.
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Thanks for writing it up, although the blog post raises more questions for me than it answers. Is that a common thing? I've never noticed overly large files, but maybe I wasn't paying attention? What is the cause of it, complex geometries? What can be done in such a case to optimise?
In our case, it was caused by a mesh.
We're working on a follow-up article now that shows how to optimize modeling meshes (eg Expanded Metal) in FreeCAD
But, yeah, it's definitely common for volunteers to open-hardware projects to produce overly-detailed CAD contributions that don't work at scale.
Ah, I see. I thought this was about an issue with FreeCAD, but it is actually a process problem. (Why wouldn't FreeCAD allow me to stuff arbitrarily complex meshes into a model, and of course that can lead to slow computation times.)
That said, analysis tools built into the software would probably be a useful thing to investigate what makes a file "slow."