I have a close surface that I created by extruding shapes. The surface has a lot of holes. Creating the holes is slow. I get slow performs (ie inserting this surface as a block sometimes takes 1/2 hour). I made the holes from extruded circles.
Is there some technique that is more efficient for making this many holes? Or is it just the nature of the beast?
(File is too big to attach).
It’s the nature of the beast.
Working in a Wireframe display mode (non shaded), will help a lot.
if this object you partially show us here goes further to the right another few kilometers then i understand that without a doubt that this would take a long time to process 
but i assume it ends there soon. so if you use boolean for all the holes and this is slow, an alternative would be to make an array of circles or the initial curves you have in place already which you use to split the surface deleting the inner split offs and extrude the curves and the rest and join it all together, its a matter of a few eyeblinks.
splitting on a similar surface took me around 15 to 20 seconds which was the biggest workload. my macbook pro is around 8 years old. swiveling the object gets a little slower but i have a display mode inwhich i got rid of all the extra shading and this helps to speed it up.
Second that!
We do a lot with perforations. When you get this heavy (dense) all applications begin to suck wind, though some much more than others. And what you show is actually kinda simple in a way. Try filleting the perforation ends and watch what happens to the file! (hint - times a lot)
Basically, best prectice is to always do your perforations last. Keep a separate polysurface without the perforations. Copy it and apply your perfs as a last step and don’t work with it, then send that monster file to whomever downstream, so they can yell at you for how heavy your !@#$%^& file is. You might even copy the ‘perf-less’ blank to another file, and just apply the perfs to the separate file. The 'perf 'file.
This way, you are always working with a clean perf-less polysurface, and your perfs geo is on a separate layer, or separate file. Important if you need to make changes, or tweak, or work with related parts. You work the perf-less stand-in, and always add the perfs last, then make the file some other poor slubs’ problem…
It is the nature of the beast for V5.
Basically, the time to do the intersections increases approximately as a square of the number of objects.
For V6 there will be some performance improvements.
These are being tested now.
The developer has ideas for additional improvements for V7 too.
Generally, I use this method. Eventually, you can use a modeling method that uses the story to quickly change all the holes.
Interesting method for planar surfaces @Zsimon, and possibly applicable to bigjim’s model.
For perforations through compound curve surfaces, modules and Paneling Tools may be deployed as well. @rajaa is a hugely valuable resource towards such.
Sometimes brute force is the only way too - a solid surface and solid perforation cuts, especially if draft and other tweaks are likely downstream.
Control can be paramount, principally if the part is representative of a highly technical molding operation.
Any way, there will be pain. No free lunch…
grazie per questo metodo
by the way if you use NewFloatingViewport and fullscreen with the os x native fullscreen and hide all the active toolbars having nothing else than the viewport and your model, it speeds up significantly either. having the viewport touching the tools and the bars seems to slow it down, its at least on a bigger screen noticeable. something which i addressed a long time ago but never got taken serious unfortunately…
i would even prefer working in this mode since its most sufficient in workspace, if one would have the ability to use MaxViewport and the sidebars and if it would not use the native bothersome fullscreen with its slow animations for the new space its creating which also breaks all other apple window-application functions… i really really hope this will be targeted once.
@bigjimslade Another idea. Try to work with curves and meshes when possible, and generate solids if needed towards the end. Curves and meshes are very light to create, edit and display. Of course, this is not always possible.
