Archicad becomes completely unresponsive when using "Expand all below" in Layout Book

[kane-take]

I am writing to report a performance issue I am experiencing in Archicad regarding the Layout Book.

Issue Description: When working with a project that contains approximately 1,250 layouts, executing the "Expand all below" command causes Archicad to freeze and become completely unresponsive to any input.

Specific Symptoms:

• Although the application stops reacting, the Windows Task Manager does not display a "Not Responding" status for Archicad.

• After waiting for about 5 minutes, the process finally completes, and Archicad becomes usable again.

• This exact same issue occurs in Archicad 29 as well.

• In contrast, executing the "Collapse all below" command works perfectly without any delay or freezing issues.

Could you please investigate this performance issue?

Best regards

[Barry Kelly]

Post moved to main community forum as it is not a Beta feature.

Do you have a file with less layouts to see if that is quicker.

Then try duplicating the layouts again and again to see if there is a breaking point.

I just doubled mine and it did seem to expand quickly but then paused as it seems to be thinking about something.

I then doubled what I just doubled (4 times what I started with) and the delay at the end was much longer.

So it does seem to be related to the number of layouts.

This was tested in 29.

You should report this to your local support.

Barry.

[Lingwisyer]

Leave it overnight and see if it finishes. Might be some odd quirk on how it expands the data tree creating some small inefficiency which is unnoticable with a more moderate number of layouts, but system grinding with larger numbers. If this was not an issue prior to AC27, maybe something to do with how it indexes for the search function.

[Barry Kelly]

It is a new right click context menu command that was introduced in 29.

It only seems to freeze for me if I first collapse all from the menu.

If I manually collapse them with the chevron, it does not seem to freeze at the end.

But that may be because I am only collapsing the main folder and the folders inside those are still expanded.

Barry.

[Laszlo Nagy]

In the BIM Manager Program, we cover performance limitations in projects. Unfortunately, we are still living in a world where the strongest hardware is still enough. There is just too much data for it in complex BIM projects.

Usually, if a project has more than 500 Layouts, that can become problematic from a performance point of view.

The usual recommendations are:

1. Create a separate file just for the documentation (you copy the project file so you will have two copies; the first one stays the Model Project File, which will only contain the model, and all Layouts except one are removed from it - a file has to contain at least one Layout; the second one will become the Documentation Project File that contains only the Layout Book, with Views in the Model Project File are linked to the Drawings placed on its Layouts - this can be done in the Organizer. In this second file, in the floor plan, all layers are made visible and unlocked and all model and annotation elements are deleted, so you will have only Layouts with Drawing placed on them in that file).

2. Sometimes it is even necessary to further divide the documentation file into multiple files, so you would have multiple Layout Book files (e.g., one containing Layouts 1-600, the other containing Layouts 601-1250).

[kane-take]

@Laszlo Nagy  

I tested this while removing layouts and confirmed that opening a file with around 100 layouts causes no performance issues. However, I really need it to run smoothly with around 500 layouts. While I don't necessarily need all 1,500 layouts in one place, splitting them into groups of 100 would result in 15 separate files, which isn't practical.

[Laszlo Nagy]

I guess you need to test how many layouts per file is the sweet spot where there is still good performance.

I would probably use a test file, and go down to 500, see if that is fast enough. If not, go down to 400, see if that is fast enough. If not, go down to 300, see if that is fast enough. Let us say, 500 will be fast enough, so that means you will need to divide your documentation into 3 project files.