AC11 slow on new Mac Pro's and Imacs

[Anonymous]

This is my first post. We recently (about a month ago) converted from Windows based PC's to Macs (Mac pro's 2.66 GHZ Quad-core) and Imacs.
We have installed all latest Mac OS updates and AC11 updates but our Archicad is painfully slow on the Macs. The disturbing beachball appears for a few minutes whenever I copy an element, when saving and generally feels slower than our older windows PC,s. Any advice?? this is particularly frustrating because we bought the macs under the impression that they will perform better than the PC's.
Regards,
Francis

[Thomas Holm]

Chris is absolutely right. Purging unused attributes won't speed anything up (they're unused, aren't they?) but they might be used in some object so don't purge unless you need to for some other reason.

Surveyor's files are often excessively big. Perhaps this tip might help:
http://www.archicadwiki.com/TechNotes/Handle_huge_surveyors%27_drawings?highlight=%28TechNotes/%29%7...

If you need to import them, use the XREF or hotlinked module feature so you can turn their display off. If that doesn't workk for you, set up layer combinations for the same function.

Other slowdown culprits are big bit-maps, scanned images, jpgs, tiff-files or pdfs containing such. Also, using the Virtual Trace feature ("ghost" in earlier versions) can slow Archicad down.

And Chris is also right that some faulty GDL object can be the culprit.

If you need an Archicad consultant, talk to your reseller or Graphisoft's England rep!

[owen]

I would suspect a network problem is more likely the cause of spinning wheel issues.

If you had a look at network traffic logs you would be surprised at just how 'chatty' ArchiCAD is - and if there is a delay in response due to a congested network or whatever, ArchiCAD will usually stall until it gets what it is looking for. License checking is particularly bad .. they make damn sure you will not get more than a couple of seconds if you don't have a license available.

I am currently in an office of 50 and the network is really being pushed. Frequent short periods of spinning wheel are so common people have stopped complaining about it .. its just what happens. Things have been tweaked and the situation improved a little but its still happens too often.

I've also had the same situation with a client (office of 15) whose network was well overdue for an upgrade (eg. large parts were not yet Gigabit Ethernet). Spinning wheel pretty much went hand in hand with an copy, save, send & receive ..... After upgrading the server and network infrastructure this problem was gone.

[Edit: I read the first post again - this is matches the most common problem these guys were having. FYI Copy & Save are two big license check flags, and then there is actually sending the file data over the network (25MB should not be a problem though).

Are you running off a network license key? If you are as a quick test to see if this problem is network based, try installing the network key onto one of the clients, disconnect from the network and work with the file on just that machine so all license checks are local. You should also make sure you are loading libraries locally, and that there is nothing in the file that will make AC try to make a network connection (hotlink module checks, titleblocks, etc). If everything is fine doing this then i would look at your network or server - are they up to the loads being put on them (hard to say without knowing how many people you have and what applications you are running). If the problem persists working locally then look at purging/rebuilding the file as others have suggested.

hope this helps

[ksjhawk]

Its great to see everyone weighing in, but we too are slowly moving to AC11 and experiencing delay between commands, slow save times, etc...i have a Mac Pro, I have installed the Intel version of AC11, and am working off of an individual key...i've tried adjusting settings, minimized and consolidated libraries, nothing seems to help...nothing more frustrating when you are motoring along, there's a delay and the software is three steps behind...i am working on a file originally created in AC10 and have not tried anything along the lines of wholesale copy paste from 10 to 11, would that even have legs though?...to be fair too, we are using a network log in system, which isn't exactly optimized, but that doesn't say much to the speed of AC11, when AC10 is pretty fast...

all this being said, if its any consolation, we have been with AC since 6.5, on macs, and it seems with each release, the mac version of the software lags behind, the software itself is incomplete, people complain and eventually it gets fixed, just in time for the next release...

keep the info coming though, and i'd love to hear Graphisoft's take on any of this rather than just our hypotheses ...

thanks...

[Anonymous]

hello, everyone, since this is my first contribution (sort- of) to the forum...

I have experienced problems you are discussing on one particular project but- on pc (dual core, 2mb ram, 256 nvidia)! as far as I could tell, thing is in network, external drawings and possibly gdl- objects related, not necessarily in the way program is working on particular machine.... now, if you can make anything out of this, fine....