I have some medium and large shapfiles that I am using as references. The Medium size (8-14 mb with 11-21mb dbf files) take around 40 seconds to attach. The attachment mode is Geographic-reprojected. It takes around 18 seconds if I use Coincident-World. This is not bad however when I reference a 37mb shapefile with a 1.7gb dbf file the attachment time is 9 minutes 30 seconds using geographic - reprojected and 2 minutes 30 seconds for coincident - world. For comparison Global Mapper will attach and reproject the 37mb file in under 5 seconds.
I am using Map SS1, can I expect performance gains in Map SS2?
Thad Clark-Soles
Hi. There are performance enhancements in many areas in Bentley Map SS2 so it's possible that these cases would become slightly better. However, we're talking about big files here. Even though you're attaching them as references, technically Bentley Map must "import" the shp format into its proprietary xfm format to be able to work with the data. The problematic case is the 1.7gb dbf file. Since the xfm format holds properties in the dgn file, you are really "importing" a huge amount of data.
The additional time in geographic reprojected mode implies that your dgn is in a different coordinate system than your shp file. If you worked in the same system you wouldn't incur that extra overhead.
You could alternately consider importing those shp files into new xfm files once if they don't change much, then use those xfm files as references.
Martin