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Model moving extremely slow

Anonymous
Not applicable
Our office is working on a 19,000 sf under roof house and the file size is 67,867 KB. It was moving a little slower than some of our other houses (expected because it's larger), but after I curved a couple of the exterior walls that have windows and doors it has been moving slower than a slug through peanut butter. I even changed the walls from complex to a composite hoping that would take some complexity out of the model, but still moving slow. For example, to move 1 door and 1 window to a different angle along the curved wall is took 20 min to select and wait then move and wait, then deselect, etc... Not sure why it's this painfully slow, has anyone had a similar issue?
3 REPLIES 3
Laszlo Nagy
Community Admin
Community Admin
Just today I came across this article about SEOs and how they can slow down the project tremendously if not done properly.
You could read it and see if that helps you solve the issue:

https://wwabim.wordpress.com/2016/03/22/solid-element-operator-errors/
Loving Archicad since 1995 - Find Archicad Tips at x.com/laszlonagy
AMD Ryzen9 5900X CPU, 64 GB RAM 3600 MHz, Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB, 500 GB NVMe SSD
2x28" (2560x1440), Windows 10 PRO ENG, Ac20-Ac27
Anonymous
Not applicable
Kelly,

SEO's are generally the biggest contributor to slow files, in my opinion. One test would be to save out a separate pln and remove all operators/targets. If the file runs smoothly, thats the culprit.

The second thing to look at is the total polygons in the model. Depending on your platform/hardware, a high polycount can bog things down tremendously. I wrote another post, testing polygons on BIMx and found they had a bigger impact on ARCHICAD: https://wwabim.wordpress.com/2016/03/16/bimx-file-sizepolygon-tollerances/
Note that these tests were done on a brand new iMac, so if your hardware is even remotely antiquated, don't expect to get anywhere near 10 million polygons and function at all!

The third thing I look for on slow files is the library manager. Make sure you do not have excessive duplicate (or missing) objects. Make sure objects and images saved to the embedded library are as small as possible. A few 20mb png's attached to over a significant portion of the modeled surfaces can slow things down. Here are my thoughts on library management: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/archicad-library-management-best-practices-patrick-may?trk=prof-post

Other suggestions that improve file speed/efficiency are the project map and layout book; clean them up and pare them down wherever possible. Files can grow a long stack of unused independent markers in the project map if left unchecked. This is very unlikely the cause of your 20 minute pauses, but these items are the list of checks that should be made first.
Anonymous
Not applicable
Thank you both for your great suggestions! I tried all that was suggested and still turned up with a slow file So I had talked to Graphisoft support this morning and turns out they will need to submit it to the developers.