Revit 2009 Wall Manipulation

[dcsmith]

We've been having a major problem manipulating walls in Revit 2009. While the project is not extremely large (~260K s.f.), it is extremely slow to perform certain operations. The worst of these is making changes involving walls and rooms - the speed is truly glacial. For example, changing a wall type takes approximately 50 seconds. Having further wall instance changes takes an additional 40 seconds. A minute and a half to make very elementary wall changes!

Given that this project has nearly 5,000 walls, it would take over 60 hours to make changes to half of them. Unconscionable, and it is certainly not endearing Revit to the die-hard ACAD boosters on the team.

Is there any way to help speed up the performance of wall manipulation? Otherwise, this seems to be a major bug.

-Crawford

[aretap]

What are you workstation specs? Unfortunately we learned this the hard way that a complex 3D software take a work horse of a machine. The other common question is how many errors/warnings are you working with, can you reduce these?

Truly though the only real solution that we have found is to get VERY powerful workstations. There are other workarounds, setting up worksets, 3GB Switch, etc but none seemed to really do anything.

Then we got 64bit vista machines with 3.2 Ghz Quad-cores and 16 GB of ram and a thicker video card along with RAID 0 (3 Drive) Hard Drives and we now fly on a project that used be slow.

Hope you can upgrade:?

[ray salmon]

yep same here
we got a 64bit BOXX quad core

its not the old days anymore

r

[Scott D Davis]

Turn off "Calculate Volumes" on the Room and Area tab of the design bar. Only turn on volumes when you need these calculations. That should help. Also, make sure you are on the latest build, which addressed some issues with video cards and drivers.

[nnguyen]

Turn off "Calculate Volumes" on the Room and Area tab of the design bar. Only turn on volumes when you need these calculations. That should help. Also, make sure you are on the latest build, which addressed some issues with video cards and drivers.


dcsmith we are having the same issue on our files when we upgraded to 2009. I submitted a support request to autodesk and they told us to upgrade to the latest build. we did that today hoping that it would solve the problem. it does not :(

Scott, to turn off "calculate volumes" do we go to: Settings->Area and Volume Computations and select "Areas only (faster)". if so, we have done this and it is still painfully slow, like dcsmith mentioned. it would take us 45 secs to sometimes over 2 mins to either create/modify/delete walls. The weird thing is if we create/modify/delete walls that are outside of our building envelope (somewhere out in space) it works fine.

I have updated my support request stating that we upgraded to the latest build but it is still very slow. We did not have this issue when we were still in 2008 and we upgraded to 2009 because we needed some of the functionality that 2009 has.

Please let us know if that is where you go to turn off "calculate volumes".

Thanks!

[Rick Houle]

Do you check your "review warnings" on a regular basis?

I'm still in 08 so i will be watching this topic closely, but we have this issue arise in 08 on occassion, general overall slowness... and the main culprits, the items we now flag immediately, are (1) walls inside of walls - walls entirely buried inside one another,,, (2)duplicate room areas inside one another... (3) CAD, yes, the biggest culprit of all... and (4) hidden room area boundary lines locked to shifting walls...

Not that any of this pertains to you, but we have rebuilt projects because of such things and get much better results after the "review warnings" are greatly reduced - **** in equals **** out... (not suggesting, just trying to provide help)

In 2008 Revit would let you join a wall INTO another one making it non-existent (not cool). Perhaps 2009 is calling out some of these "warnings" or errors and creating a backlog...(?)

[nnguyen]

Do you check your "review warnings" on a regular basis?

I'm still in 08 so i will be watching this topic closely, but we have this issue arise in 08 on occassion, general overall slowness... and the main culprits, the items we now flag immediately, are (1) walls inside of walls - walls entirely buried inside one another,,, (2)duplicate room areas inside one another... (3) CAD, yes, the biggest culprit of all... and (4) hidden room area boundary lines locked to shifting walls...

Not that any of this pertains to you, but we have rebuilt projects because of such things and get much better results after the "review warnings" are greatly reduced - **** in equals **** out... (not suggesting, just trying to provide help)

In 2008 Revit would let you join a wall INTO another one making it non-existent (not cool). Perhaps 2009 is calling out some of these "warnings" or errors and creating a backlog...(?)

We had only 3 warnings before the upgrade. We audited the file before upgrading too. We are fairly good at addressing warnings. I think we have 15 or less, mostly the duplicate mark warning with some components. When we were in 2008 we had many more warnings (around 50) before we decide to cleanup the file before the upgrade and it did not have this problem.

[dbaldacchino]

I recently had an issue where file performance overall slowed down in a particular project in 2009. Upgrading the display driver solved the issue. I also have to say that by upgrading the display driver, Revit 2008 now crashes on projects where it used to be very stable, so I have to roll back my driver when I'm working on a project that is and will stay in 2008. Man, can't have it both ways I guess!

[sbrown]

I know this doesn't sound like a pleasant solution but have you tried turning off Hardware accelleration alltogether. Go to your display, right click, Properties, Settings, Troubleshotting. Then drag the scroll bar to the left.

[scott.latch]

As nguyen has done, I urge anyone having performance problems or any problem for that matter to contact Product Support. They can work with Development to resolve the issue. The more examples we can look at, the more likely it will be to solve.

When contacting Support I recommend that you provide the project file and a journal of what you are trying to do when the problem occurs. Providing them when opening the Support Request will allow the Support Tech to look at the issue sooner.

[dcsmith]

We've actually picked the low-hanging fruit as far as fixes to this problem goes: openGL turned off, room volume calcs turned off, latest build, review and resolution of outstanding errors, etc.

My suspicion is that the issue has something to do with the way Revit 2009 is doing the room calculations, as I have noticed that walls are much quicker to manipulate when they are not associated with a room object.

-Crawford

[lev.lipkin]

It is hard to tell without looking at actual model. Could you get model to Support following Scott Latch's advice? This will be very helpful. Thanks in advance.

[nnguyen]

It is hard to tell without looking at actual model. Could you get model to Support following Scott Latch's advice? This will be very helpful. Thanks in advance.

We uploaded our models to support last week Thursday. Hopefully support finds an answer soon. Support didn't ask for journals, so should I upload those too? Thanks.

[jeffh]

We uploaded our models to support last week Thursday. Hopefully support finds an answer soon. Support didn't ask for journals, so should I upload those too? Thanks.


It is always a good idea to upload journal files even if support does not remember to ask for them.

[nnguyen]

**Update**

We are still haveing this issue. Support has sent the file and issue to the development team. Hopefully we will have a fix soon!

[ntn75]

Hello, we had solved the same problem by :

1. Turn off the "Room Bounding" of all exterior walls (Often if you have a complex exterior geometry, Revit 2009 will take forever to calculate room area...)
2. Use "separate room boundary" to fix the Room/ Room Tags

[nnguyen]

Hello, we had solved the same problem by :

1. Turn off the "Room Bounding" of all exterior walls (Often if you have a complex exterior geometry, Revit 2009 will take forever to calculate room area...)
2. Use "separate room boundary" to fix the Room/ Room Tags

In #2, do you mean use room separation lines? either way, that won't work for us. the room separation lines also take a while to modify/add because the issue is how Revit is calculating the room area. Our project is quite a large project to make all the exterior wall non-room bounding. Thanks for the suggestion though. We are still waiting on autodesk support to come back with a solution. hope they come back soon **fingers cross** since it is making people very frustrated.

[tamas]

Thanks for everyone in this thread for sending their files to support. We were able to identify a couple of issues that lead to the slow performance reported here. Unfortunately these problems only became noticable in highly complex models. This is probably why our internal testing had not uncovered them before shipment.

As walls are connected to many elements in the building, slow performance of modeling walls may be caused by a number of very different reasons.

Some of these recent problems can be avoided by odd workarounds like the one ntn75 mentioned. I believe his model had huge slanted face-based exterior walls. Normal vertical walls would not have caused the problem.

The individuals reporting the problem to support should receive communication if their particular issue is avoidable even before the code is fixed.

However, not all causes have simple workarounds, which means you just have to wait for our next web update. (I think Ngan's model may fall into this category.)

Tamas

[dbaldacchino]

Always a great pleasure to hear from the Factory. Thanks Tamas!

[nnguyen]

Thanks for everyone in this thread for sending their files to support. We were able to identify a couple of issues that lead to the slow performance reported here. Unfortunately these problems only became noticable in highly complex models. This is probably why our internal testing had not uncovered them before shipment.

As walls are connected to many elements in the building, slow performance of modeling walls may be caused by a number of very different reasons.

Some of these recent problems can be avoided by odd workarounds like the one ntn75 mentioned. I believe his model had huge slanted face-based exterior walls. Normal vertical walls would not have caused the problem.

The individuals reporting the problem to support should receive communication if their particular issue is avoidable even before the code is fixed.

However, not all causes have simple workarounds, which means you just have to wait for our next web update. (I think Ngan's model may fall into this category.)

Tamas

Thank you so much for the update. Is it possible to get a ETA on when the fix will be coming? Lots of people breathing down my neck about this...it's getting to be way to hot for me, I might just have to get out of the kitchen! :) or just start drinking an ice cold beer early in the day.

[gsucci]

Thanks for everyone in this thread for sending their files to support. We were able to identify a couple of issues that lead to the slow performance reported here. Unfortunately these problems only became noticable in highly complex models. This is probably why our internal testing had not uncovered them before shipment.

As walls are connected to many elements in the building, slow performance of modeling walls may be caused by a number of very different reasons.

Some of these recent problems can be avoided by odd workarounds like the one ntn75 mentioned. I believe his model had huge slanted face-based exterior walls. Normal vertical walls would not have caused the problem.

The individuals reporting the problem to support should receive communication if their particular issue is avoidable even before the code is fixed.

However, not all causes have simple workarounds, which means you just have to wait for our next web update. (I think Ngan's model may fall into this category.)

Tamas

Thank you Tomas.
We are experiencing as well the slowness of manipulating walls for large projects (revit 2009).
I have been "ordered" to go in and debug the project, to understand if we were doing anything wrong. After a few hours of debugging, I simply deleted all rooms in the project, and performances went back to the snappy normal...

At this point I wonder: should we just wait for a web update, or Autodesk has figured out some workarounds to make areas and rooms calculate faster (or not at all, untill we really need updated calculations!).

Thank you

PS: we are still on 20080321_1900, has anybody experieced improvements with the latest build?

regards

gio

[cliff collins]

A couple of other suggestions:

1. Try Grouping a large number of the walls (say, all interior walls on a particular floor.)
Does this help?

2. Make sure that walls are on common worksets--i.e. all interior walls on same workset,
perhaps exterior walls on another workset. Does this help?

3. Try grouping all interior walls, and turning the Group into a separate Revit project.
Then, Link the new "walls" project back into the main model. Does this help?
There may be certain adverse joinery effects, but the file should react much faster.
You can edit the walls in the "linked" file--then reload in Manage Links.

4. Are a lot of the walls attached to floors, ceilings, and roofs? If so, try detaching them.
Does this help?

good luck!

[tamas]

Gio,

As I wrote, there could be many reasons of wall related performance problems. You found that if rooms were no longer calculated the file became much snappier. I wonder if you had room volume calculations turned on or off.

Without actually seeing your file, it is impossible to tell exactly what is causing your slowdown. Have you tried contacting Revit support?

Regards,

Tamas

[sbrown]

Have you tried making sure that your schedules are ALL closed. We found that if a schedule was open revit was painfully slow but when it was closed it was smooth sailing again. Note this was for furniture schedules with 1000's of furniture pieces scheduled byt room.

[gsucci]

Gio,

As I wrote, there could be many reasons of wall related performance problems. You found that if rooms were no longer calculated the file became much snappier. I wonder if you had room volume calculations turned on or off.

Without actually seeing your file, it is impossible to tell exactly what is causing your slowdown. Have you tried contacting Revit support?

Regards,

Tamas

I am trying to get IT to install the latest build, since it appears it has specific improvements for editing walls with rooms.
Also, we are indeed in the process of contacting support concerning this.

In any case, as for several other things in Revit, I think one of the main problems is the fact that Revit attempts to calculate the antire model, in real time, all the times.
For example, selecting a wall and changing its type mark value to some other number, should not involve any room area calculations.
But it does, hence to just select the wall takes several seconds, on a slow machine.

This is similar to panning on a sheet with lots of views, Revit will recalculate all views, no matter if nothing has really changed in them, and performaces will suffer greatly.

And yes, hardware will get better and better, but let's not fool ourself, projects will get more and more complex (because there will be more 3D, and people will ask more of Revit the more the software wil spread and become popular).

Meybe cashing is the way to go, here. Cache views that do not change, and recalculate them only on request or if something acually change...Like AutoRegen in Acad.

Cache areas and rooms, recalculate only on demand...

Cache everything...then, once you are ready for you coffee break, hit the REGEN button....eheh

thank you

regards

gio