Awful performance

[Milan]

Hey guys,

I have been working on this particular project of hotel and residence, is 30 story building, and has some detailed elements, like facade with horizontal cladding done with profile walls. But lately, performance is just poor. Drag and select take ages, deselecting is sometimes impossible, 2d screen is not responsive, 3d slow, but improved after i changed Graphic Card settings, is spinning more than is efectively working. Is a cocept stage, so, not a lot of composites. 

And my machine is quite powerful:

Intel Core  i9 14900k

64Gb RAM

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080

Should I send a file for analisys to a Graphisoft support team, since this is more time waiting and spinning than actively working. And we paid quite a lot for this licences, so, any advice would be nice. 

Thanks,

Milan 

Operating system used: Windows 11

[Eduardo Rolon]

In theory not needed since the main file will already have them. The updated version of this workflow since PlotMaker no longer exists is:

1. Save file as PLA
2. Open File reading the objects from the Archive and "Open & Repair selected file" checked.

Hopefully that will clear out any invalid objects.

---

Since you will be doing this on copies of the file (to keep the original safe) you could experiment to see what goes wrong and adjust as necessary.

[Laurentiu C]

Your specs are definitely not the problem here. It's definitely something related to the model.

It might be helpful to take a look at this guide How to Optimize Your Project Performance and hopefully something there can help you discover where the issue is.

You can also try using the PolyCount Add-on (it's part of the Goodies package) and see if there are any particular objects that have huge amounts of polygons. If you find them, then simply recreating/replacing the objects with a simpler version/less polygons might help a lot with both 3D performance and redrawing time.

It's posts like this that make it clear to me we need better tools to troubleshoot performance issues in Archicad. I highly suggest liking the WISH: Performance metrics and hopefully this will nudge Graphisoft to increase the performance transparency and take performance more seriously in the future.

[genarch]

I had an interesting experience just today related to performance of Archicad 27. I very recently upgraded to a Mac Studio Max and was expecting a big performance bump over my 2017 iMac Pro. The 3D rendering was much faster but navigating the 3D model was laggy as was panning and zooming in 2D. Needless to say, this was frustrating! But today I purchased a new mouse and now panning, zooming, and general navigation is MUCH faster! Maybe there was something wrong with my old mouse (which was probably 12-14 years old). Maybe my experience will help someone else!

[Milan]

I tried now with new cable mouse (mine bluetooth is also kinda new, few months) and nothing happens. Will try now resaving file options!

Thanks for sugestions!

All the best,

Milan 

[StefanV_BCP]

The main reason for this could be the following:
- Attribute pollution

- Too many embedded library parts

- Poor geometry optimization (I would suggest a hotlink approach for dealing with this issue)

- Maybe there are a lot of degenerative elements that slows down the performance.

I would start testing with a copy-pasting group of elements in a fresh file and see when the performance hit the throttle.

Cheers,

Stefan

[Milan]

Hi Stefan and thanks for the reply,

- Attrivute pollution - not sure what it is, and how to solve? With purge option? 

- Embedded librraries I just cleaned up

- Poor geometry optimization - maybe just whith this facade elements, i have a lot oif them, but neither they are something extra poly for this kind of machine, also this is suppsoed to be BIM software, so i dont want to imagine what would happen in detailed structural design phase

- Degenerative elements - no idea whats that 😄 

Can you explain furthermore please? 

Thanks!

Milan 

[scottjm]

My suggestion is to save a copy of the file and set aside a few hours and systematically remove stuff from the file.

I would work through and just  start by removing 1 story, and then give it some tests in 2D and 3D. If it’s still slow remove another story, and keep repeating until you get better performance. 
If you get a significant performance increase all of a sudden there is likely an element of that story you most recently deleted that was corrupted.  To confirm this, make another copy of your original file and delete only that story that gave the significant performance improvement and see if it happens again. 
It’s a long process but essential to systematically trawl through all parts of the file. 

I would still send to GS support too. I have had glitchy files where they have identified a corrupted railing that was causing all the issues. Once it was removed it fixed the issues. Railing and curtain walls are infamous to cause issues. 

[StefanV_BCP]

- Attribute pollution in short terms can be described like this.
Imagine you have a dwg file and you decide to explode it. That means that you import dwg line type fills etc, which can slow the performance because you imported something optimized for software that made that dwg. Thats just an oversimplification of the topic. It is kind a broad topic for me to write it down in a single comment. Try to investigate it through a web search.

- Poor geometry optimization

No matter the specs you have at your disposal, simply software itself has some limitations. I imagine you have a lot of arc types of geometry. This can be an issue being that for one arc you need 3+ polygon. There are some tips and tricks on how to alleviate this kind of issue, but again that depends on the design itself. For now, my suggestion is to investigate hotlinks as a mean to ease up the load on the model.

- Degenerative elements are usually poorly constructed slabs or meshes.
More on this: Degenerated Polygons - Graphisoft Community

Cheers/Pozdrav,

Stefan

[Milan]

Since you told me the rails and curtain walls, i was about to investigate them but then i decided to reinstall archicad first and check so. But think that curtain walls may be the problem,  rails also! Will let you know! 

[Milan]

Hi Stefan,

Thanks for the info. Building is circular, so yes, but if the limits are soo low, then for us is not worthy to pay this amount of money for something that was supposed to be solution for any kind of ideas... 

Again, in my file something may be wrong, but generaly is lowweitht file.

I will keep you all informed about any solutions!

Cheers,

Milan