Slowness while saving an AutoCAD Products drawing to a network location

Autodesk Support

Mar 26, 2025

Products and versions covered

Issue:

When saving a drawing in AutoCAD Products (e.g. AutoCAD, Civil 3D, etc.) to a shared location or to a network drive, the process takes a long time to finish.

Causes:

Slow network connection.
Corruption or excess content in the drawing files.
Tool palettes are shared in the network drive where all users have write access.
Corrupt AutoCAD settings migrated from a prior version.
Unused or corrupted Xref

Solution:

Do one or more of the following:

On the command line in AutoCAD, type the following variables and set them 0 (zero):
- CACHEMAXFILES
- SAVEFIDELITY
Optimize the drawing files. See Optimizing drawing files in AutoCAD with Purge, Audit & Recover
Remove unused Xref
Change the default saving DWG format version to 2018 or a more recent version from Options Dialogue.
Edit user rights to the Tool Palettes folder stored on the network, so that only read access is available.
Reset AutoCAD Product to defaults. See: How to reset AutoCAD to defaults or How to reset Civil 3D to defaults).
Uninstall and reinstall AutoCAD Product with all the latest updates.

Products:

AutoCAD for Mac; AutoCAD LT for Mac; AutoCAD Products;

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