Hi Innis,
I'm currently working on an AC3D model with 64,000 vertices, 68,000 faces. It takes about 4 seconds to open, and I'm running on a P4 2.4ghz with 512MB of RAM, under Windows. I notice some lag while editing with all objects showing (i.e., not hidden), but definitely nothing serious. I'd say that this is not an inordinate size for a model in AC3D - however, it may depend more on your system specs.
When your model takes 10 minutes to load, is the model already in AC3D format, or are you converting from another format? Conversion can be slow, depending on the format and contents.
Also, my model has all of its faces/vertices in 25 different objects - this allows for very fast editing/operations. However, if every surface were in its own object, it would be painfully slow to work with (and I'm almost certain that would slow down the loading, but haven't experimented with that).
If you have the patience to open this thing again, try going to the Tools menu and select "Model info...". At the very bottom, you should see a line like this:
Total objects: 25 surfaces: 67984 vertices: 63736
What do you have there? You may have a high object count, or a low surface-to-vertex ratio (which can be optimized by using "Object | Optimize vertices...").
Also, re: memory allocation --- are you using Windows? If so, Windows should handle all memory allocation, and will take whatever the app needs. If you're talking about pre-allocating memory, I'm not sure how to go about doing that, but it's probably best to let Windows manage it. I doubt the app claiming memory blocks is a big bottleneck, anyway, although I could be wrong.
Dennis
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