How to deal with too large files?

We're in the middle of a project. It is, for us, a rather intricate and large biogas plant.

Besides the usual problems with SW routing we've now run into another snag namely that we have asm's that we can't open in SW anymore.

We can open them in edrawings but we can no longer open some of them to edit.

Some of them we can open only in lightweight (and hidden components not loaded) which ofcourse gives as all kinds of false errors in the FeatureManager Design Tree.

Now the largest of these asm's have a filesize of 54.9 MB and the smallest of 23 MB. Ofcourse, this being routing it means that those asm's are actually just a collection of other asm's so as to get an overall view. Now a little while ago there were some pictures of routing projects that Andy Hughes had put up that had far more pipes showing and of which I would presume would make what we have look like childsplay. So how the heck did they do that? My machines specs you can see in my profile. When I called my VAR about it, all they could suggest is using speedpak or switching to a bigger system (64 naturally).

There speedpaks havien't been around that long, nor semi affordable 64 systems, it does make me wonder how those that made the examples that Andy showed did it?

Bottomline, how do you deal with large asm's and what would you recommend in trying to slim them down or keeping them useable.?

SolidworksRouting