Migrating your office library by manually resaving every object?

[James Murray]

Can we get some elaboration on this: https://community.graphisoft.com/t5/Teamwork-articles/Library-Migration-a-Vital-Part-of-Keeping-Perf...

It claims that users should migrate their office libraries for every new version of Archicad, by opening and re-saving each individual object. It further claims "legacy libraries hurt the performance of a project, not just at every open, but also during several other operations".

I have never heard this. I have never noticed a drop-off in file or library performance on migration, and if I have, no one has ever asked, "Well did you resave all your objects individually?" This workflow is absurd for us given the number of objects involved.

What is the cause of the alleged performance hit? Does it happen equally at every version update? Does it happen only with major changes to GDL? Is there a test I can do to see if specific parts don't migrate well? Are very old parts more hazardous than parts from AC23? Is the performance loss of keeping old parts greater than that of carrying a 750MB AC Migration Library? Has Graphisoft support been swamped with calls where the problem was solved by this process?

Is there anything Graphisoft could do to ameliorate the issue, rather than passing another software maintenance task along to users?

No reason is given for why I should worry about this, and without some evidence, I'm not going to start. So, any further useful info would be welcome.

[SenecaDesignLLC]

It's my knowledge to migrate an old library if it's not something you wrote yourself you just need to load the migration library save your file and then unload the migration library and it should have replaced any previous Archicad elements with newer components

I have had issues moving from 22 to anything onward when a project was that old but I think that was just settings I messed up on things that I was messing with.

But at this point any file from 23 to 25 I don't seem to have any issues just loading the migration library saving and unloading the migration library

[Laszlo Nagy]

I can not comment on reasons but I think the "LP_XMLConverter" tool can convert whole libraries to the current Archicad version very easily. You can find the tool and its documentation in the "PreviousLP_XMLConverter" folder within the Archicad application folder.

[Noemi Balogh]

As the author of the article, I can confirm that this is an issue with each and every migration between major Archicad versions. This is a limitation of the GDL language and how it is handled by Archicad.

From our experience, there are many support cases where performance issues were caused by old libparts - running and migrating their scripts took a while. If you check them all alone, it's more visible (e.g. have an empty project in AC22 let's say and the corresponding library and then open it in AC25 without migrating the libparts), but when it is in a large project, you probably will think "Oh yeah, it loads longer because my project is so big.". 

I understand your frustration about the amount of work it requires, I know very well that this is far from convenient. When it comes to performance issues, it can save you time, but all alone the whole topic is enormous and depending on many factors, so you might skip this step from your workflow and try to manage your performance in other ways.

[DGSketcher]

Hmmm, the lp_xmlconverter doesn't seem like the most user friendly solution to this problem. If the core of the issue is things that would show up in "Check Script" e.g. deprecated global variables etc., then why can't GS automate the process to check a GSM file or folder and display a report of the errors, rather than expecting user's to work through opening possibly hundreds of files, many of which may be ok? Or even create a batch Check & repair process that just reports the files with remaining issues? If it is a problem for Support then surely it's worth finding a user friendly fix that can be easily applied by both users and Support?

[James Murray]

Thank you for the reply. I must say I don't understand the issue any better. It is definitely a problem, but you might not notice it, and it's complicated, and you might not have to worry about it, and it might not be worth the effort to address.

If a performance problem isn't noticeable, then by definition it isn't a problem.

A lot of Archicad technical advice has this flavor, and it's frustrating. We are warned about having "too many" polygons, sections and elevations, layouts, or SEOs. How many is too many? Well, you'll know if you hit the limit. Some people are working multi-skyscraper developments, some on small single family homes. For our work, closer to the smaller end of the scale, I have concluded that none of these limits are anywhere near us, and the library advice is going on the same pile.

It would be welcome to get more specific advice relevant to actual project (and library) scale, but apparently that isn't available.