Multilevel Stairs - Performance Problems

[DanielleAnderson]

Another person in our office brought this to my attention and I thought it would be worth bringing to the group here:
New project in Revit, only 12 megs, it's a really small 17 story residential tower with lots of curtain wall. The model, at this point, is just a shell & core, and not very detailed. All was going well until model performance came to a screaching halt - took forever to do anything, took forever to regen, took forever to print, etc. She started to go through her model thinking that perhaps it was too detailed and had too many surfaces. She brought all the mullions back to rectangles, purged the drawing and noticed no difference. Then she tried removing the multilevel stair and all of a sudden the model performance went back to normal.
Has anyone else seen this? Any explanations? I have to admit that I haven't had a reason to use a multilevel stair - too much floor variation in my project.

[aaronrumple]

Another person in our office brought this to my attention and I thought it would be worth bringing to the group here:
New project in Revit, only 12 megs, it's a really small 17 story residential tower with lots of curtain wall. The model, at this point, is just a shell & core, and not very detailed. All was going well until model performance came to a screaching halt - took forever to do anything, took forever to regen, took forever to print, etc. She started to go through her model thinking that perhaps it was too detailed and had too many surfaces. She brought all the mullions back to rectangles, purged the drawing and noticed no difference. Then she tried removing the multilevel stair and all of a sudden the model performance went back to normal.
Has anyone else seen this? Any explanations? I have to admit that I haven't had a reason to use a multilevel stair - too much floor variation in my project.
Using groups for the units?

[DanielleAnderson]

Using groups for the units?

Nothing has been grouped yet, but the building is a little interesting in that there is only one unit per floor (the footprint of this thing is only 2700sf) and 16 completely identical floors, so groups are a possibility, although these are new Revit users who have an initial opinion of the software that it is quirky. Groups may exacerbate that.

[michael.deorsey]

What version are you running? We've been using multi-level stairs since v7 and not had any performance problems with them. Currently we are in 9.0.

[patricks]

What about the default railing that Revit puts with stairs, the one that has numerous vertical balusters? Try doing the multi-level stair again, and if performance suffers, try deleting that default railing to see if that helps. Over 16 stories that's a TON of balusters, thousands of surfaces, etc.

[DanielleAnderson]

What about the default railing that Revit puts with stairs, the one that has numerous vertical balusters? Try doing the multi-level stair again, and if performance suffers, try deleting that default railing to see if that helps. Over 16 stories that's a TON of balusters, thousands of surfaces, etc.

Yah, I was wondering if it is a railing problem... I'm not sure which railing she was using.
We are in v9.0, by the way.

[david.metcalf]

Perhaps we could make a workset out of the stairs and use that to control what is opened for viewing. I liked the idea of setting balusters to a simpler leaner look.