Teamwork - very large project database

[pejotu]

Hi!

We're working on a seven storey hotel interior.
Very little of the model has been done in Archicad, focusing only on the interiors, furniture etc.

Still, the project file has become very large and a little too sluggish.

As a local .pln file the project file is 400 Mb, but once it's loaded into the teamwork server, it suddenly grows into 1,8 Gb!

Any tips on making the file smaller?


(I've tried optimizing, for example making .mod files of some large 2D-drawings that don't need to be edited etc, but this had no effect)

Working with Archicad 14 on WIN7 64bit workstations (+ 1 32bit XP), the server is a 32bit XP machine.

[Anonymous]

Hi,

I Have similar problem.

Recently our file became Extra slow. When I entered Our server manager, I saw that project is 12,6 GB large.

After cleaning the file from unnecessary elevations/sections/viewports/layouts nothing happened - the file is still 12,6 Gb. I've checked polygons too and it's pretty neat.

We even tried to leave the project and reset TW machine.

I had that issue before and I don't know how to solve that. Please don't tell me to start with new file because It's too time-consuming.

Our TW machine is used only as a Teamwork and Database machine and it's running on i7 3,4 Ghz, ssd, 16GB ram, Win 10. We are connected via LAN (1Gb/s speed).

For now file became unworkable because any action, even selecting an object, takes forever.

[schagemann]

Have you tried resharing the 'bloated' teamwork file, i.e. do a save as then reshare?

Also try to avoid the PLN backup's on the bimserver, since they require user interaction they might be kicking in simultaneously.

Btw. 16GB is in our experience the bare minimum for bimserver and not really suited for bigger projects... also please amend your signature so we can see what hardware you are using.

[Anonymous]

FWIW - we've had very similar experiences working with larger TW projects.

Currently we are using a Xeon CPU, 64GB RAM, 512GB SSD (hardware) RAID1 on Windows 10, but send/receive can still be incredibly slow (workstations are 2015 CTO iMacs with fastest CPUs/GPUs and 16 or 32GB RAM, 1Gb LAN)

Windows Task Manager on the TW server shows utilization between 7 and 30% CPU, 20% RAM.

This is ArchiCAD 19 (9001). Will be upgrading to 20 soon.

I'm glad to see Graphisoft finally managed to update the system reqs article to something better than "2GB of RAM or more", but I think what they really should do is release a benchmarking/auditing tool that we could run on our servers which would consider not only the hardware specs, but also the number and size of projects hosted on the server.

Currently the only metric for project "size" we users have is filesize, which I fear has actually very little to do with how well the project will actually run...

[schagemann]

The benchmark tool is a great idea.

As the current bimserver manager activities display is rather limited in its usefulness, such an alaytical tool could be really beneficial and eventually it should become the central management hub for TW projects.

We had previously suggested to Graphisoft that the bimserver manager should display the following:

- collect all crash reports from workstations before sending them to GS;
- backup settings overview;
- global backup setting adjustment for all projects;
- global project size reporting with history;

...if you can think of anything else please feel free to add.

[Anonymous]

Those are all great suggestions!

I would also add a report on what projects are using any given library (so we don't have to open a project in AC just to see which external TW libraries it's linked to). Ideally one would be able to just click a library name in the Libraries-view in BS/BC Manager and see which projects are using it.

I've been tinkering on a Python client for TW, theoretically some of this stuff could be done through it (like get a list of all projects and their sizes, members etc):

https://github.com/filipp/bimclient

... my main motivation for that was automated TW server monitoring.

[Anonymous]

Save as PLN, delete as many cad files as possible and unnecessary libraries/objects than reshare the model works in these cases.

This works. Also make sure network is Gigabit connection, 100Mbit network will kill the process.