Archicad Layouts and Slow Speeds And File set ups

[WojinRina]

My company uses Archicad for our multi residential buildings.

We have a 3 file set up.

• Main File

  • Model, and master layouts

• Building File

  • Where our hotlinks come from

• Detail Library

  • Where we store all of our details and publish to PMK files

Our model/master layout is a large drawing around 3.9gb which tends to react quite slowly when working with layouts.

We have around 400-600 layouts in the file, all with a range of 4-30 views placed on them.

Again this creates quite a slow layout manipulating process. To place views and move them around can take hours on end and just watching the mouse wheel spin.

Has anyone worked in this scale and what was your file setups like? How has speed been a factor with certain file set ups? Has anyone adopted a master layout file separate from their model file?

Thanks for the help!

[Erwin Edel]

Those placed views, how many elements do they include?

I've worked on a 3rd party file a while back where the project had one worksheet which contained all the detail drawings and the details had a few exploded DWG files which had a lot of duplicate element. The result was I think in the hundreds of thousands of elements on one view, which made Archicad come to a crawl, much like you described.

4 GB seems about a magnitude of 2 too big, but that is mostly scaling up from projects we have with about 50-100 layouts.

There should be a white paper floating around for 'big projects', but it is probably very outdated by now.

ArchiCAD23 and up should not be updating things that are not shown on cropped views on layouts, which should make things a bit faster.

[Laszlo Nagy]

Have you considered having a separate file just for the Layout Book? You would still be able to place any View from the main Project File onto the Layouts in the Layout Book file.

You could even have several Layout Book files, not just one.

For Drawings placed on Layouts, I would consider experimenting with the following two options:

1. "Update Type" field set to "Manual".
2. "On-Screen Preview" field set to "Quick Preview" or "No Preview".