Hi all,
I kow this topic has been discussed in the past, especially during a class at AU 2006 & 2007 by James V.
I was under the impression that when a project was split into worksets and only select worksets were opened, that somehow, whatever command seems slow when the whole project is open, would seem much faster when only part of the information was loaded. After some tests, I can't come to this conclusion. The only advantage I'm seeing is that by opening select worksets, your memory useage drops and you don't run the risk of running out of RAM. So as of now, I would say worksets can improve stability on large projects, together with reducing demand for RAM (and thus control harware costs)
For example, here's a typical scenario. I have a large project and placing a wall is slow (you might be familiar with this....Revit churns and thinks, the progress bar moves to some percentage, then a bit more, than....almost....done). This happens whenever I move a wall or create a new one for example. Or add a door, or move one....it's just too sluggish. I couldn't find any constraints and the wall hosted families were minimal (some plumbing fixtures).
The file was originally 215MB. I deleted all the groups (these were used as furniture "blocks"; yes, they should be families and nt groups) and the file slimmed by 55MB. There were 600 warnings and I quickly resolved them down to about 240 by deleting a bunch of overlapping walls and unbound rooms (remember, I'm just troubleshooting as quickly as possible here!). I also deleted 3000 beams and 4300 web joists from the project. These should be in a separate structural file. The project is now down to 93MB. That's what I call a big loser and it shouldn't act too sluggish. Or so I thought.
So now I tried placing a wall....but Revit still churns a bit, although it's not as atrocious as before, but still not acceptable. So I decide to test how faster it would be if we split the building (High School, probably around 375,000SF foot print, 2 floors) into "X" worksets. So I just copied some walls onto a workset and closed everything else. I'm thinking that now when I draw a wall, it should fly as if I'm doing a single family residence. Not so fast. I could barely see a difference, as Revit still churns and hesitates before finishing the command.
Are you noticing the same behavior on large projects? Is it that large projects will be slow, regardless of how many worksets are used and opened at a time? Any advice/observations/tips? I really don't know what else to look out for but can't convince myself that we have to live with this on large projects. Thanks for any feedback.