I mean the “wireframe” like in the screenshot in my post above. Is it the simplest possible? If it is, there’s hardly a way to make the file any smaller.
In the end it boils down to “gerber code for one via” 115000 times. If one via takes, say, 250 bytes, it will be about 30 megabytes. That doesn’t include the overhead of everything else in the file. If you want to know the details:
- Vias themselves are flashed, one via takes one gerber line:
X173800000Y-86100000D03* - If you have so coarse zone filling that the clearance hole is an octagon, it takes basically 10 similar lines, 8 for the octagon and 2 extra for connecting the polygon hole to the rest of the polygon.
It’s even theoretically impossible to go below that with the current gerber generation algorithm. The only way by changing the algorith would be to replace the 8 octagon lines with one arc (which is basically covered by the wishlist issue above). Even using circular apertures with “clear” polarity for clearance holes wouldn’t then help much more.