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Identifying root cause of FreeCAD file size bloat (eco-libre.org)
submitted 7 months ago by eco_libre@lemmy.sdf.org to c/freecad@lemmy.ml
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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.

Troubleshooting Large File Sizes in FreeCAD

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[-] tofubl@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 7 months ago

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?

[-] eco_libre@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

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.

[-] tofubl@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 7 months ago

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."

[-] eco_libre@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 7 months ago

Agreed. I also submitted a feature request to add this to the GUI:

this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2025
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