Updating in Plotmaker is extremely slow

[Anonymous]

We use ArchiCAD 9 with Plotmaker 9 (making the switch to 10 very soon).

We often run into problems with updating drawings in Plotmaker. We typically import views directly from our .pln files--we find it works much better than creating .pmks.

The process of updating our ArchiCAD views into Plotmaker is very, very slow. Is there a workaround? We've noticed that signing into Teamwork files, as well as sending and receiving, is horribly slow too.

Could it be our network? Our libraries, Archicad files, and Plotmaker files all live on our server. We use Mac OS X at our workstations.

Please help...this is driving us crazy and really slowing us down!

[David Larrew]

Unfortunately, .PMK files are the solution for AC9/PM9 update slow-down (as suggested by Graphisoft). And as you will learn once you upgrade, AC10 does not allow you to create .PMK files (although you still will be able to read legacy .PMK files).

We've noticed once .PLN/.PLP files grow to a certain file size the update process slows considerably. How big are your .PLN/.PLP and .LBK files?

Network speed is also a factor.

[Anonymous]

Thank you, David, for your advice. We had been updating straight from our .pln files to avoid .pmks--they used to do that before I started working at my firm and it had resulted in tons of .pmks in our network (resulting in, "which one is the current one?") I had AutoCAD & Microstation experience before this.

Yes, our Teamwork files are huge, and our plotmaker files, linking directly to .pln files, are also huge. One file, we managed to shave down to 100 megs from 150. But that's still quite large!

I'm hoping our upcoming switch to ArchiCAD 10 will solve this and help us avoid delays due to updating.

I also saw something on this forum about large libraries...so I'll see if we can trim our libraries down.

Thanks again!

[Djordje]

I have moved the topic here as it is a more appropriate place, IMHO ...

Anna, what are the specs of your computers?

Where is the library and how is it organized? How big is it?

I do suspect some cleanup and organizing is required ...

[Anonymous]

My workstation is a G4, dual processor, 1.25GHz, 768M of SDRAM.

I think the other workstations are the same, maybe a little faster.

The server is a 1.33GHz PowerPC G4, with 1.75GHz SDRAM.

I believe we're all running on Mac OS X 10.4.8.

Our typical ArchiCAD projects load three libraries: ArchiCAD 8.1 & 9, both located locally on each workstation, and our custom library which is located on the server. ArchiCAD 9 library is 140M, ArchiCAD 8.1 is 130M, and our custom library is 55M. I think that the reason we load both the 9 and 8.1 libraries is for projects that were started in 8.1. Also, we often "grab" details from older projects that might be referencing parts from the 8.1 library.

I imagine that the ArchiCAD libraries are locked--otherwise I'd love to go in and purge some stuff out that we never use.

As I mentioned before, our .pln & ESPECIALLY .plp files are pretty big. But even the small .pln's take forever to update in Plotmaker---which is why I think the slowness is due to huge libraries.

[Anonymous]

more ram will help. our minimum standard now is 2 gigabytes. anything less we found to really stall the process.

Large libraries do affect the update time, but IME only during the phase where the project itself is loading into BGArchiCAD. Once the views are starting to genereate, I haven't noticed any difference.

The only other suggestion I might offer is to only update a few views at a time, when you need them, and then wait until you're printing a full set to worry about updating the whole book at once. When you start that, go get lunch and come back later...

hth
wes

[TomWaltz]

It's a G4, That's going to be painfully slow I'm afraid.