Bloat

I’ve spent the past two days dealing with Autodesk’s bloat. Well actually it’s been the past six years since I’ve been using Civil 3D. With a new release the bloat doesn’t appear to be a topic Autodesk feels it’s worth dealing with. I guess for 2014 it continues with the monstrous 12 GB download for the Infrastructure Design Suite which turns into a rather large expanded file size, of which I haven’t figured out how big it is. For I’m still waiting for the install file to download after 8 plus hours. I’ve heard rumors just to install the package it tops out at over 45 GB of hard drive space required. Only want to install Civil 3D and another item and not the rest of the package? Well you’re out of luck since you have to endure downloading, unzipping everything, and then choosing what you want to install. I’m fairly certain I’ll never have a need to install plane Jane AutoCAD when I have Civil 3D and Map 3D installed.

I recently was programming the creation of an AutoCAD table and adding blocks to the table in a drawing. In order to separate my software development from my drafting work I utilize Virtual Machines with a reduced amount of RAM available. Still a healthy 3 GB, but not necessarily enough for Visual Studio and AutoCAD Civil 3D to coexist on such a machine. I run out of memory when modifying the cell height of the table, which promptly crashes AutoCAD Civil 3D.

Now you might think it’s a huge file that I’m using that causes the program to crash. Well it’s not. It’s an empty out of the box Civil 3D Imperial template with nothing else in the drawing until I create the table. Not quite sure what’s using up all of the memory. Now I thought it might be my program, except before loading it AutoCAD Civil 3D is already using 200 MB from opening the program.

Bad things start to happen when a computer starts to run out of RAM. I know I’ve lived the past six years of living through it.