topic Re: Merge & Trim and SEO Slowdown in Installation & update

Merge & Trim and SEO Slowdown

JaseBee — Tue, 24 Aug 2021 23:41:37 GMT

Firstly, I'm aware that too many SEO commands can create detrimental performance, however I'm curious as to weather other users are noticing a similar significant drop in performance.

So, to the problem.

Current file: 500sqm 2 storey house, ~1,500 3D elements, ~ 110,000 Polygons.

In this project I've been trialling letting building material handle most of the intersections. Preferring to use trim to roof and merge instead of flat out SEO's (my understanding was that this operations weren't as heavy as SEO's)

Unfortunately the project has started showing signs of slowdown, it's not the absolute worst, but changing a surface override for example takes 3-5 seconds, if I clear all the connections and reduce all layer intersections to 0 then it's virtually instantaneous.

I know that the connections are always going to create excess load on the computations, but this is a relatively small job and I'm not using the building material intersections in any weird or unusual way that they weren't designed for. And they are starting to effect productivity with compounding of small little time lags here and there. All of which seem to stem back to this issue, even in floor plan display it seems.

I should note too, I have followed the speed issues document at the graphisoft help desk. There are no heavy objects or trees or meshes, the problem occurs with filtering out all elements except wall, slabs and roofs.

So not necessarily looking for a fix (though it would be nice) but just seeing if this problem is occurring with normal use for others?

Re: Merge & Trim and SEO Slowdown

Anonymous — Wed, 25 Aug 2021 04:34:54 GMT

3-5 seconds is really nothing, But if you want instant response you’ll have to invest in significant hardware, an iMac with 8Gb ram is below minimum spec for Archicad. If wanting to stay with Mac the 27inch iMac with 8core 10th gen i7, 64Gb RAM, Radeon Pro 5700xt and a 1-2 Gb ssd is really the lowest spec to start giving this type of performance

Scott

Re: Merge & Trim and SEO Slowdown

Eduardo Rolon — Wed, 25 Aug 2021 11:37:16 GMT

Doing SEOs indiscriminately will always cause problems but they can be managed by:

Only use meshes for SEOs with meshes and have an unique Layer Intersection number for them so that AC does not have to evaluate the model

If possible do not SEO walls to mesh for sections and elevations since you can just send to back the mesh and it will look correct. If you need to send a DWG of the file it will look incorrect in Autocad since "send to back" does not work as expected.

Do a test on a copy of a file and cancel all SEOs to see if that is really the problem

Turn off "Auto Update" for layouts

Re: Merge & Trim and SEO Slowdown

JaseBee — Thu, 26 Aug 2021 03:54:40 GMT

The 3-5 seconds is for changing a material override on an element, if the SEO' are all cancelled then this change is instant. But have been noticing other issues when changing views, going to a floor plan with a different cut heigh seems the worst, sometimes 30s to 1min.

I know that it will never be instant on an Imac, just didn't expect it to have such a significant drop in the plan space and the 3-5s lag for basic setting changes is a bit annoying, mostly because it is instant without SEO's.

SEO's are only ever used deliberately, the base slab of a building is virtually the only object (or sometimes objects) cutting a mesh, walls are never used. But the problem seems to be rooted in inter object SEO's either discretely applied (Never holistically selecting all of this and trimming to that) or automatically via intersecting building materials, not really with any meshes (and meshes don't participate in intersections anyway). Particularly the ones between walls and roofs seem to be the problem.

Have already copied the file an deleted all SEO's and noted an improvement in performance, however when you also level all the layers intersections to 0 (so no building material intersections are computed) it also speeds up significantly. But at least you can manage that portion of the slowdown with layer combos.