Purge “Registered Applications” to Speed Up AutoCAD

Posted December 15, 2008 * Comments(7)

Matt Murphy showed this tip in a class at Autodesk University. He explained that AutoCAD attaches XData to objects in drawings and this data allows information to be associated with specific objects. The problem is that when objects that contained XData are deleted from the drawing, the registered application becomes unreferenced. If you get a large amount of unreferenced registered applications in a file, it can increase the file size and cause sluggish performance.

The only way to purge these unreferenced registered applications is to access the Purge tool from the command line. Type -PURGE on the command line and you will see this:

Enter type of unused objects to purge 
[Blocks/Dimstyles/LAyers/LTypes/MAterials/Plotstyles/SHapes/textSTyles/Mlinestyl
es/Tablestyles/Visualstyles/Regapps/All]:

Then type R (for “Regapps”) and it will prompt you with this:

Enter name(s) to purge <*>:

Type an asterisk (*) to purge them all. It will then ask you if you want to verify each registered application name to be purged. I recommend typing N to speed up the process.

7 Comments so far

  1. Christopher on December 15th, 2008

    That’s the hard way to do it if you have lots of files. Check out this app from Autodesk for the lazy way.

    http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/item?siteID=123112&amp;id=11807875&amp;linkID=9240618

  2. Tom on December 16th, 2008

    Hi guys,

    Here’s a static URL to this utility that will not change.

    http://usa.autodesk.com/getdoc/id=DL11807875

    Let me know if you have any questions on this.

    I have access to the guy who wrote it ;)

    Regards,
    Tom Bradley
    Autodesk Product Support

  3. Josh Jones on December 16th, 2008

    Thank you Tom and Christopher for sharing these links.

  4. Darrell on December 23rd, 2008

    You might want to tell people that the app only works on 2008 and 2009.

  5. Shijin Prasad on January 20th, 2009

    Hi Guys,

    My Auto Cad 2008 is making my PC very Slow when I’m working on a CAD file. Could please help me to increase the performance?

    Regards,
    Shijn Prasad R S

  6. Keith Harris on September 14th, 2009

    I have tried the -purge, regapps and it cleaned the file up. When I worked on the file again I ended up with the same problem.
    I am working on Autocad 2010, how can you help

    Regards

    Keith Harris

  7. Brian Glassman on July 26th, 2012

    I also tried the -purge, regapps command which worked as long as I was in the file. When I saved and reopened the file, running the command deleted the same things as before.

    Any thoughts?

    Thanks
    -Brian

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