Scheduling Zones - calculation extremely slow

[dominicus]

Hi,
I have a project (16 storey highrise) with interactive schedules calculating area/volumes using zones
I have placed them by hand because they are calculating different areas of the floor plan (appartments/commercial/technical etc).
I find the calculations take forever in some cases and fast for fewer zones.

BUT I don't think this should take as long as it does (in some cases up to 1,5min per sheet).
What are the criterias that slow the calculations down?
Now a publishing set of 6 different calculations can take up to 3-5 minutes to publish.

Any thought on best practices using interactive schedules?

All windows and doors using the same method also takes ages.


Thanks,

Dominicus

[Ghaleb Khadra]

dominicus wrote:
Hi,
I have a project (16 storey highrise) with interactive schedules calculating area/volumes using zones
I have placed them by hand because they are calculating different areas of the floor plan (appartments/commercial/technical etc).
I find the calculations take forever in some cases and fast for fewer zones.

BUT I don't think this should take as long as it does (in some cases up to 1,5min per sheet).
What are the criterias that slow the calculations down?
Now a publishing set of 6 different calculations can take up to 3-5 minutes to publish.

Any thought on best practices using interactive schedules?

All windows and doors using the same method also takes ages.


Thanks,

Dominicus

Hi Dominicus,

Thank you, first and foremost, for posting here on ARCHICAD-Talk. I highly appreciate your active participation on the forums.

I will answer all of your questions to the best of my capabilities.

By default, Zones are the heaviest elements for schedules to calculate and process due to their nature of being connected to many other elements. Also, each of those elements have their own parameters specifically relating to Zones, and the same can be said for some GDL objects as well. This heavy web of interconnectivity is what caused the schedule to become slower whenever Zones were involved since more calculations are happening.
The more elements there are which are interacting with the Zones (Walls, Doors, etc.) the longer it takes. This is why I believe some of your schedules are faster while others are slower.

One thing which may exacerbate the problem would be the usage of parentheses ( )
Also, the bigger the project, the more elements it will contain and so more elements to be calculated.

We spotted this behaviour earlier and have already addressed it with the release of ARCHICAD 23. So in ARCHICAD 23, the schedules have been optimised greatly especially those involving Zones. They are faster than ever since the entire mechanism was reworked on a very large scale.

I would highly recommend you to upgrade to ARCHICAD 23 if your work heavily depends on Interactive Schedules.

While we have not implemented these changes in ARCHICAD 22, I can provide a suggestion, which does the trick.
Utilise custom Expressions if the requirements to be shown are not many. While it is a bit of extra work to create the Expressions, it is a great way to circumvent the big interconnectivity I mentioned earlier and it can save you time when schedules are taking a long time.

I hope you found this information to be helpful.

I wish you a great day!

Kind regards,
Ghaleb

[dominicus]

Thanks,

This was a good explanation and I will check the same file in AC23 and see if it helps + check the same calculations with the use of expressions

Thanks,

Dominicus

[Ghaleb Khadra]

dominicus wrote:
Thanks,

This was a good explanation and I will check the same file in AC23 and see if it helps + check the same calculations with the use of expressions

Thanks,

Dominicus

Fantastic!

Feel free to post the results of your finding here if you wish!

Have a fantastic one!

Kind regards,
Ghaleb