Low Archicad Performance (Teamwork/Local) on High-End Hardware

[ionico]

Hi everyone,

We are facing an intermittent but critical issue in our office: extremely long loading times when opening certain Archicad files, along with very slow Teamwork operations (reserving, sending/receiving). The problem primarily affects Teamwork projects, but sometimes it also impacts heavy local files (.pln). We are trying to find the bottleneck, as we have already ruled out hardware and network issues.

Workstation Specs:

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X

• RAM: 128 GB DDR5

• Archicad Version: 27 (Build 5003)

• BIMcloud Basic Version: 2023.3 (28.0.46.4603)

Infrastructure:

• Network: Local LAN, stable 1 Gbps (verified true speed).

• BIMcloud Server: Hosted locally, on the same subnet as the workstations.

The Issue and Observations:

1. Opening certain Teamwork projects can take up to 30–40 minutes.

2. Teamwork operations (Reserve, Send & Receive, Release) take an abnormally long time.

3. Opening certain local files can also take up to 30 minutes.

4. During this "hang" while loading, resource monitoring shows almost no system load.

5. CPU utilization hovers around 20–40% (no spikes).

6. RAM is far from being maxed out (plenty of free memory available).

7. Network activity is practically non-existent (minimal traffic).

It feels like Archicad is waiting for something, or there is a timeout occurring when accessing libraries or external hotlinks, but we can't seem to track down the exact cause.

Troubleshooting Steps Already Taken on "Problematic" Projects:

1. Cleaned up embedded libraries, attributes, layouts, drawing views, layers, etc.

2. Re-uploaded the "clean" project to the BIMcloud server.

3. Eliminated complex high-polygon geometry. We use only standard libraries and tools, with no third-party add-ons.

4. Checked the allocated disk space on the BIMcloud server (we have about 200 GB of free space left).

This issue specifically affects large-scale projects that contain a lot of geometry and external hotlinks to other .mod files and external Teamwork projects. Empty or lightweight files work incredibly fast. We design objectively massive projects, but we already heavily optimize the geometry, the project structure, and the hotlinks. We have reached a point where there is literally nothing left to simplify or purge, which is why I am asking for help.

Has anyone encountered similar behavior on modern high-end hardware or with these specific versions of Archicad? I would highly appreciate any hints or pointers on where to dig next. Thanks in advance!

[Laszlo Nagy]

Can you give a few pieces of info about the problematic project?

1. What is the size of the project file if you save a PLN to your local drive?

2. How many Layouts do you have in the Layout Book?

3. What is the polygon count in 3D?

4. Do you have large image files or DWG/DXF files placed in the Project using the Drawing tool?

5. Do you have Point Clouds loaded in your projects? How large are they?

6. Have you performed many SEOs in the project?

7. Do you have Trace Reference saved in Views or Views used as Trace References in various Viewpoints?

7. There was one suggestion by someone recently: Do you have the "Fade Environment" checkbox checked in the Desing Options Palette? Do turning it off make any difference?

8. There was also another thing suggested recently:

1. Everyone leave the TW project
2. Start a new empty Project in Archicad
3. Delete everything from the Local TW Data folder
4. Close Archicad
5. Restart Archicad and
6. Rejoin the TW project with Local Data now gone.

[ionico]

• After saving the problematic project as a local .pln file, its size is 1.05 GB (whereas on the Teamwork server it occupies 2.5 GB).

• The Layout Book contains a total of 75 Layouts.

• Polygon count (calculated using the Polygon Counting Tool): 1,702,103. Notably, the Curtain Wall tool accounts for 40% of the geometry.

• No, there are no placed DWG drawings in the project.

• There are no Point Clouds.

• No, I am not using Solid Element Operations (SEO).

• No, we do not have views saved with Trace & Reference enabled. There are also no such views placed on the Layouts. We use the Trace & Reference function during work, but usually turn it off immediately after use.

• Yes, we use Design Options, and we usually disable the "Fade Environment" checkbox. We do not observe any performance difference between having "Fade Environment" on or off.

• We have already tried a similar scenario. We saved the Teamwork project locally, then shared it to the BIMcloud server as a duplicate of the "problematic" one, after clearing the local Teamwork data. Unfortunately, this did not help.

[Roman-PS]

What kind of weird questions in 2026. 

With all the amazing hardware available.

The 30 + years old software is the problem.

Why not ask Claude Code to optimize it finally?

[Laszlo Nagy]

---

@Roman-PS wrote:

What kind of weird questions in 2026. 

---

Sorry, could you clarify what you mean? I am not following.

[Roman-PS]

It is obvious, isn't it? 

There is tremendous progress and advancement in hardware development and resulting performance capacity, but Archicad is only getting slower with each version, with no speed gains at all. The software is the bottleneck, not the devices or OSs.

Waiting time with teamwork projects is a real issue, especially.

What I mean is that modern coded software should harness all available power of the currently existing hardware, even more if the hardware and software are getting more expensive over time.
Polygon count, number of layouts, etc., all these issues you mentioned shouldn't be a problem at all.

[Laszlo Nagy]

Yes, those waiting times in Teamwork can be frustrating.

However, I do not think that hardware progress has been so tremendous in, let's say, the last decade.  During this period, single-core performance of CPUs only doubled, roughly. Yes, multi-core performance, graphics performance, AI performance increased a lot more, but CAD and BIM software in general are predominantly single-core heavy. 

At the same time, BIM projects are increasingly more complex, contain more data, more element connections and dependencies. So in the area that matters the most for BIM software in general (this is not only Archicad) there was not a huge growth. CPU single-core performance is nowhere near increasing at the rate it did in the 2000s or the 2010s, because CPU design started hitting the limits of physics in terms of power consumption and heat. Just look at how maximum CPU frequency has nearly flatlined in the last 6 to 8 years or so. As soon as we hit 5 GHz in 2018, there was not much further progress from there. The highest frequency right now is around 6 GHz. They cannot really push it higher.

And then we haven't even started talking about how people use their software, which can make a huge difference. The points that I listed above are there because they can influence to a very high degree how smooth the Archicad project runs on the hardware. One can optimize these things so the same project can run much faster on the same hardware, use fewer resources, take less time to open, save, run. This is again not Archicad-specific. All other BIM software have these things that you can optimize so that the software can take advantage of the hardware much better. 

[Laszlo Nagy]

It may be advisable for you guys to contact your local resellers. They are probably more experienced in what else could be causing this and will be able to help you in pinpointing the exact source.

[Mahmoud Qenawi]

Hi all,

Based on the given data mentioned above & asking Google AI, here’re some reasons you should check I hope it helps.

[Turit]

Is there a fence modeled with a railing tool?
In my experience,  a long railing results in a very large performance drop.

[karsten_bauschert]

We are sometimes facing performance problems with our bigger projects as well,
so the measures already taken or suggested sound very solid to me with not much to add.

Sometimes we find major culprits (network, messy libraries, solid element operations, IFC hotlinks or layouts..) but some projects just remain slow.
Escalating the issue to a Graphisoft support is the way to go.
This might even rise the demand at GS for better troubleshooting features to be developed and implemented.

Also slightly off topic, but the high polygon count from the curtain wall tool is most likely a result of round profiles,

similiar as modeling with the railing tool and using round (and even hollow = x2) poles or lattice.

This creates many many polgons as Archicad cannot create real bend surfaces.

[Roman-PS]

Unfortunately, this is all SAD but TRUE.

And no real escape.
It is the same on Apple High-End Hardware.

[Lee Hankins]

We used to experience slow loading times on Teamwork projects both using BIMcloud Basic and SAAS. We found it was often caused by the Teamwork model referring external files such as jpegs, DWGs and Modules that were stored on our server and not in BIMcloud. If you break the links to any external files it seems to improve loading times. Alternatively upload the files to the BIMcloud Server which also seemed to help. 

[Yegor Shulyk GLA]

My personal experience tell me that main problem is numbers of the hotlinks - because it is a natural Groups and when you have multiple groups inside of the groups and cause huge lost of the time when ArchiCAD checking reservations of all of that inserted entities. It is no solution for right now except future optimization of hotlinks performance and evade to have any groups inside of the hotlinks

[Ricardo Heim]

Hi,
Maybe there are things woth cheking out.
Your BIMCloud Basic machine (server) have a good hardware? Are the projects saved on a hard drive or a SSD? Because the problem seems server-side from what you are showing. Slow reading times and operations when the server is requested the most. Maybe your office is working on multiple projects at once, demanding more from your server.
And for the local files you open on your machine, there can be a lot of things that slow things down, we need more information to help out...