FILE SIZES

[lcohen]

our office is working on a project that consists of about one million square feet of construction. needless to say we have "broken up" the project into a series of parts that are then linked and grouped into the main "site" file. regardless we still have enormous file sizes, our largest file consiting of a group of buildings being around 250MB in size and extremely difficult to work with. our main "site" file is 150MB even though all the buildings are linked into it...

does anyone have some insight on tricks or tips on how to keep file sizes small with linking, grouping, reducing, etc. we have stumped the people from revit support and am putting it out there for any user tips that are out there.

[matt_dillon]

Have you already reviewed warnings (Tools->Review Warnings) and addressed any issues there?

[bbeck]

Worksets are going to help. Being able to decide what loads when you are opening a project is a big help.

[lcohen]

how can i stipulate what gets loaded when i open the file?
can anything be done with printing... it takes over 15 minutes to print one page!

[dhurtubise]

how can i stipulate what gets loaded when i open the file?
can anything be done with printing... it takes over 15 minutes to print one page!
Are you printing directly yo the printer?
Try spooling on your machine. Try printing to PDF then to your printer if you have PS drivers

[dhurtubise]

Sorry forgot to answer the first part.
On the open dialog boix, just on top of the open button you have the ability to deal with what worksets you wanna open

[lcohen]

we have actually tried all those options with printing. i'll look more into the worksets but i have a feeling that it might not do too much since each link still has to be loaded...

the files are just too big...

[david_peterson]

You're only at 250? I've got one model that when I link all the arch models in so i can look at foundation coordination, it's closer to 350+. The struct model alone is 125. We've tried everthing and it's not getting any smaller. Then you do something like change a beam size of worse yet adjust a grid line. Good Luck. If I did that at 9am I might be able to make another adjustment by noon.

[lcohen]

david, how are you able to function then?

[david_peterson]

slowly....very slowly.
Ibasically unload everything I can and save it that way. I don't usually load much of thier stuff in unless I need it. Our Archies have been exporting things to cad so we look that the cad drawing to make the adjustments to the model. I also only have one view open at a time. This seems to help. I'm just waiting for them to come with with a linix version like the used to have for Acad. the old X-windows. It was some much more stable then. Or heck, give me back a dos version that I don't have to run on windows.
My other major issue is that I'm still running a P4. I'm getting a new box for x-mas (well it's going to be after that now) that's got 4-8 times the horse power. One of our other issues with the project in question is that the archies modeled every reveal and notch on the existing buildings. Plus it's a CIP building so that makes it even worse for us. I guess the other thing to do is make sure you don't have many constraints. If you constrain something to a wall, and then the wall to another wall and so on, when you go to move something, it needs to redo the whole data base to make the change. On large projects, I'd go with the less is more theroy.