Huge File Size... Is there anyway to Audit?

[saeborne]

Hi all,

Thanks for taking the time to review this post. A project team in our office is experiencing severe Revit performance issues. It might take 3 minutes just to open a new window. It takes forever to Save to Central. It's really rough.

Poking around, I've noticed that their model size is HUGE (635 MB). Is there anyway to audit why the model is so large? It's a large building, but not that big. It's multi-family residential, but all of the Units are in a different linked model.

I would love to be able to export a project summary, that says something like:
* There are 50 MB of cad files loaded.
* There are 200 MB of component families.
* There are 100 MB of groups.

Something that would help us understand why the model is so frigging large.

Thanks again.

[bbeck]

Hi all,

Thanks for taking the time to review this post. A project team in our office is experiencing severe Revit performance issues. It might take 3 minutes just to open a new window. It takes forever to Save to Central. It's really rough.

Poking around, I've noticed that their model size is HUGE (635 MB). Is there anyway to audit why the model is so large? It's a large building, but not that big. It's multi-family residential, but all of the Units are in a different linked model.

I would love to be able to export a project summary, that says something like:
* There are 50 MB of cad files loaded.
* There are 200 MB of component families.
* There are 100 MB of groups.

Something that would help us understand why the model is so frigging large.

Thanks again.


How is your project setup? Worksets, Linked models, etc.... Our Largest single Revit Model is 1.2Gb, additional linked models bring the size to almost 2Gb. Open only worksets that need to be open. Linked models on their own workset.

Clean up WARNINGS. That's the best route to go first. Weekly CENTRAL file maintenance, perhaps add a compact in to that process. Delete unused views might gain you some ground.

Every open view/window in the background requires resources. Close hidden views.

Make sure your LAN doesn't have a 10Mb hub/NIC bottle neck on it somewhere. How many users are actively in the model simultaneously?

[saeborne]

Hi Brian,

Thanks for the reply. To my knowledge, everything on the network side is on a gigabit switch. At least that is what our IT guy says. The team has about six people who hit the model at the same time.

The Core and Shell is in one model, and all of the units are in a linked file.

They have turned on shadows in a lot of the elevations, to highlight depth. Does this chew up resources, even if the elevation views are not open?

In your 1.2Gb model, how was the performance? Did you have people pulling out their hair due to lag?

[david_peterson]

Cad files will kill performance. We had an issue where a file size ballooned. Instead of linking a cad file, someone had inserted it and they hid it in a view after, and they duplicated the view about 50 times. Cad files in Revit are evil. I've worked with a lot of 600+mb files. Performance is a little slow. How many people are actively working in your central file? If you have more than say 5 people working of the same central file, you're going to run into issues. If you have 10 people working in it, expect it to be super slow and crash a lot. We had an issue where 18 people were all working in local files (all from the same central) and they all opened up the worksharing monitor tool. running gigabyte network. It crashed our network server. Be very careful with that tool. 200mb file is small IMHO. I've working on a 280mb file with 57 linked models. If I add it all up, I think I've got close to 8GB+ of data for this model. Still runs, you just have to be efficient with how you set it up.
What kind of workstation specs are you running? We're getting close to upgrading again.
Hope this helps.

[Devin_82]

Cad files will kill performance.

I have found that this is one of the biggest culprits in view performance issues, especially when there isn't some other more obvious issue. Our office has a workset for Linked CAD files and I advise our teams that they should NEVER insert CAD files, always link them so you can use the manage links to remove them and clean out the old ones every once in a while.

[david_peterson]

I should also mention there were several instances of copied linked cad files in that model as well. The file size in a matter of 6hrs went from about 450mb to close to 2GB! I can't say this enough. Cad file are pure evil when used in Revit. If you need to copy something from cad, link it to a dummy model, trace the cad file with revit lines and then you can remove the link and copy the line work into your project file. If you don't like that option, plot the cad file to a scaled PNG file, link the png file. Not best practice, but better than linking Cad IMHO. If you need to use Cad, use cad. Separate the 2. Keep the cad stuff in cad and print from it. Anything. Just don't bring it into Revit. If you need to do it just for a quick coordination, open the model detached and link it.

[saeborne]

Thank you for the responses.

I would not be surprised if some CAD files were imported, not linked. How do I identify the imported CAD files? How can I find them to purge them?

Thanks,

[Devin_82]

That is the bad news, as far as I know, there really isn't a way to find them other than to open views you think they might be in and take a look. I think there are Revit Addins that might do what you need, Ideate Explorer comes to mind (http://ideateexplorer.com/features/). If there is a way to do it natively in Revit, I would love to konw what it is.

[jsteinhauer]

There are third party tools that you can use to find loaded AutoCAD. The one that comes to mind is Ideate Explorer. Not sure the cost, but it is much faster then a view by view search.

[mahboobfacet]

This is one good plugin available - has some good features..

http://www.modelmedic.com/