Permanently increasing size of pnl. file!!

[Anonymous]

It's been some time that we are having a problem with a permanently increasing size of a specific project..
The project details : 3D Host project consisting of 3 buildings grouped in 2 hot-linked multistory modules that have nested modules of some apartments and other repeating elements.The size of it 430 Mb !! (when working in AC 16 the project was 80-90 Mb)

I have looked up in internet for different solutions of optimization, I have done a lot of experiments to figure out what increases so much the size. Deleting Layouts, sections and facades, atributes, didn't help too much...
Now we are cleaning them up regularly, but still not big changes..
Can it be the new Attribute Building material, of AC 17 the problem ? Because it always creates new materials..? What is the most "hevy" in a project?

Well, there should be an explanation of this...hope to find it..

[Anonymous]

Not sure how helpful i can be for you with this but in a similar vein
we export our archicad files into artlantis for visualisation
we discovered that the bigger the file size the longer it would take in timeframe to render.

one of the oddities we found along the way in trying to reduce our own AC file sizes

was survey plans we received in imported dwg format 2d lines many many 2d lines very short some as short as dots and sometimes many hundreds of thousands of lines and some lines stacked on top of one another seemed to really slow things down oddly and that cleaning up these type of 2d elements made a reasonable difference to us. which makes no sense that getting rid of 2d elements make a 3d visualisation work better

I hope it helps or gives you some ideas of where to look.

[Anonymous]

methy wrote:
Not sure how helpful i can be for you with this but in a similar vein
we export our archicad files into artlantis for visualisation
we discovered that the bigger the file size the longer it would take in timeframe to render.

one of the oddities we found along the way in trying to reduce our own AC file sizes

was survey plans we received in imported dwg format 2d lines many many 2d lines very short some as short as dots and sometimes many hundreds of thousands of lines and some lines stacked on top of one another seemed to really slow things down oddly and that cleaning up these type of 2d elements made a reasonable difference to us. which makes no sense that getting rid of 2d elements make a 3d visualisation work better

I hope it helps or gives you some ideas of where to look.

It was exactly our problem! Actually the mistake was that we were overlaping the 2D DWG files of the civil ingeener on our project in order to make the corrections (not the best idea of course).

Thanks for the answer though 😉

[Anonymous]

I have noticed that my Archicad 17 project file has been progressively increasing as well. However, my problem is not due to 2D line information as mentioned above.

I have been looking at various modifications to a small house design concept using the marquee tool to copy the entire house for each modification that I am considering. At times, I delete several copies of the building as I abandon a particular design approach. However, I have noticed that the file size does not decrease at all after deleting those copes as mentioned!

As an experiment, I deleted all 25 copies of the house model leaving no remaining project information. Surprisingly, the file size did not decrease at all!

The file has grown to an alarming 616MB. What can I do to get the file size to drop down in relation to the model information currently contained in the file?

I have tried saving my project under a new name but this makes no difference.

[Karl Ottenstein]

I deleted your duplicate post, Scott. Wish someone else had responded - you've been waiting a week, so I understand your frustration. Have you been in touch with your friendly, free Tech Support folks? They might like to get a copy your file - although now at over 600 MB uploading to a file sharing location might be problematic for you!

Typically, file sizes increase from the various previews that are stored in the file for Nav Preview and drawings for layouts, etc. I assume you have all of that turned off. In any case, deleting your content should have reduced the file size ... so this is an issue for tech support to investigate.

(For what it's worth... copying your building 25 times in the same file is highly not recommended... better to Save As to create variants. But that's another discussion completely.)

Support contact info for US users:
http://www.graphisoft.com/info/where_to_buy/north_america/#US

[Anonymous]

I figured out what was happening. I have never paid much attention to the compression options for saving a file (File / Save as / Options / Compress File). Apparently my files were originally being save as compressed.

As my project progressed I was saving copies of files periodically. At some point I must have saved a file as "uncompressed". From that point on any files that I saved continued to be uncompressed files with a significant jump in file size from the originals.

The strange thing is that when I deleted significant model information from the uncompressed file (like deleting 20 houses as I mentioned earlier) the file size never changed!

I have recreated a series of deletions to my original project file in both the compressed and uncompressed format. I repeatedly deleted more and more model information while saving between each change to observe the change in file size. The uncompressed file size never changed (not even by 1kB). However the compressed file size changed in proportion to each deletion that I made, as expected.

So my problem is solved! I just need to make sure that I always save in the compressed file format. This is however, very confusing. I do not understand why the uncompressed file format behaves this way. I also do not understand why the compressed format is not simply the default option. What function is the uncompressed format intended to provide?

[Karl Ottenstein]

Glad you figured this out. Again, I encourage you to phone or email tech support to ask them the questions at the end of your post. 😉

I believe the compressed IS the default until you change it.

Why an uncompressed file is never cleaned up is a question for GS.