Would like feedback regarding network speed for Bimcloud SaaS from current users

[Roderick Anderson]

Hi everyone, I am considering doing the conversion of our permanent licenses (with SSA) over to the new Archicad Collaborate and make use of the Bimcloud SaaS instead of using BimCloud Basic on our server here at the office. However, I am concerned about the real-life speed of network-interaction actions such as:

1. Reserving and releasing elements in Archicad
2. Send/Receive
3. BimCloud PLN snapshots

We are used to the instantaneous reservation and very fast send/receive operation with our BimCloud Basic as we have a robust dedicated server and well-done internal LAN with Gigabit network speeds.

Even though we have pretty good symmetrical 300Mb/300Mb upload/download Internet service, I am concerned about  the usage of the BimCloud SaaS being slower in practice than our local BimCloud Basic. I do expect there to be some lag since EVERY interaction (every reservation, etc.) has to go over internet traffic, I would like to get some feedback from other users that have made the change from BimCloud Basic over to BimCloud SaaS regarding real-life performance?

One of the advantages of the SaaS is that I don't have to be re-newing the Server every few years, and the cost of the server balances out a bit with the extra expense of the SaaS, but if the performance is not good, then that advantage goes away.

Feedback please.

[Roderick Anderson]

@Patrick M hope you're well. I saw some post from you regarding slowness of some of the management actions on BimCloud SaaS. Has that continued to be a problem? Do you have feedback about the daily modeling work via SaaS?

[easyDoesIt]

Hi Roderick, 

We have been using bimcloud saas for the last year. Actually, our whole system is now on SharePoint, so no server at all! The removal of having to maintain a BIM server (and file server) has been great. We have staff both in the office with a dedicated fibre connection to the office (I think it's 500mb) and staff outside the office on 50 MB connections +. I personally am outside the office with a 50mb connection. Inside the office, I would say a 1.5x increase in wait time. Outside office 1.5 - 3 times, but only really noticeable on large projects. We asked our local Archicad distributor to provide us with a test account on BIMcloud Saas to test our largest projects (about 8 GB on the BIM server) before we went down that path, so I would suggest you do the same.

The first join to a project is something noticeable, as downloading a lot at once, really dependent on connection speed and how many staff are doing it at once, if on the same connection. Fixing corrupted files, saving as a solo, then putting back on can be time-consuming and can slow down the team... If having corruption problems.

BIMcloud Saas was down only twice over that year for about 2 hours each time. 

Overall, I don't think we would go back. There were initially a couple of complaints (not many), but the advantages of

1. Users can work remotely easily (in combination with SharePoint),

2. No BIM server hardware costs,

3. No BIM server and BIM software maintenance costs,

I think outweigh any disadvantages.

[Lee Hankins]

We moved our local BIMcloud Basic to BIMcloud SAAS last December. It is slower than the on premises system as I would expect but nowhere near as slow as I thought it would be. We only have a 70mb down and 30mb up on our internet as FTTP isn’t available in our area yet. The first time Libraries are downloaded is slow, about 5 mins for all libpacks but after that it takes around 15-20 seconds. The .pln backups are painfully slow though, mainly due to our upload speed, it’s quicker at home where I have a 1GB connection. 

We are experimenting with using the BIMcloud Delta Cache but I’m struggling to get it to work. I’ve also added a wish that the Delta Cache deal with .pln backups so you can save them locally and then that machine deals with the final upload to BIMcloud SAAS. 

With regards to the comments above about moving everything to Sharepoint, we were strongly advised not to do that by the IT company we work with and I know Graphisoft advise the same, not to use cloud services for hosting Archicad files. So we still store all of our data locally on a Synology NAS. 

[Lingwisyer]

Yeah, we were working with AC files directly on Sharepoint for a little bit and ran into sync and storage issues. We swapped to using a NAS which periodically syncs to Sharepoint.

Delta Cache is suppose to make it so that your operations are not all performed over the internet. I can only find old documentation for it though from before SAAS, though it is supported apparently...

[kevindavis]

Hi,

We moved over about 2-3 months ago and haven't had any noticeable issues with speed and have actually been really impressed by how well SAAS has performed, generally a lot better than our old BIMCloud Basic on site.

[kevindavis]

Hi Mark,

A slightly off topic question but interested in the side move to Sharepoint as well, which we have also been looking at.  Have you also been publishing to Sharepoint (as we haven't worked out a way to do this), but effectively want to be able to publish to our fileserver (which we do to the local fileserver at the moment, but would need to get to publish to Sharepoint if we moved across) rather than into SAAS and having to do a manual download?

Thanks in advance

[Lingwisyer]

You can sync sharepoint folders to your computer or NAS. You would then publish to this location and it will be synced up. Do not that there is not way to force a sync so it can take a couple of minutes for other people to see any contents updates. That is the main advantage of syncing to a NAS instead, as then everyone local can just read things straight from there, but it does mean you lose out on user access tracking as Sharepoint will now see everything being accessed by the NAS login.

I have not dug into it, but I have not seen a way to save files directly to Sharepoint like the Office Suite always tries to do...

Ling.

[kevindavis]

Thanks Ling - the issue we were having publishing to synced folders on the local machine is that the path is different for every user and even when you use ~/ etc in the file path ArchiCAD then replaces this with the /User/username/ so we would need to set up duplicate publisher sets for each user in a project or we use a synced NAS but if we have to maintain a NAS we still have an on site setup.  

We have added being able to publish to Sharepoint to the Wishlist, or if you were able to sync files with SAAS in the same way you can with OneDrive etc that would be even better but not holding my breath!  Was just interested to see if anyone else had found a solution we were missing.

[easyDoesIt]

@ kenvindavis.

I am not sure of all the technical detail (setup by our IT guys) and this solution is for PC.

Our sharepoint drives (we have a few due to size of data) are all available on windows explorer as a type of network drive.

In terms of publishing, and for that matter hotlinks. We have a type of shortcut on our C drive, when we set up publish sets or link hotlinks, we use the shortcut in the path and it doesnt add the username in the path.