Revit (ARCH) family file size

[bmillerponcho]

I have a lot of families that seem to be large file sizes (400kb) for what they actually are. I have one family (entourage) that is only 4 small lines and it's 360kb. Is there a way to make these file sizes smaller? It's seems rather larger large for what it is; literally 4 lines. 2D, nothing modeled. 

[BIMologist_]

can you please post an example rfa file?

[Paul_F_Aubin]

360KB does not sound that large to me. Most family templates start at around 250KB with nothing in them. Yes it is only four lines, but I wouldn't be too concerned with it. Now if it was 10x that big, it might be another story...

[rosskirby]

Don't forget that there is more to a family than just the lines you draw.  It's not as simple as a CAD block.  There are parameters, multiple views, and all the behind-the-scenes stuff that ties the family and its data to the relational database that is your project.  If your family heads north of 1 or 2 MB, then you might start running into problems if you've got more than 20 or so instances in your project, but only in the performance of your machine, not in the actual file size.

Remember that just because you've got a lot of instances of a single family in your project, though, that the file size of your project doesn't increase by the full file size of the family every time you create another instance.  That is, if you've got a 100 MB project file, and you place 20 instances of a 1 MB family, you're project size isn't going to jump up to 120 MB.  Itll jump to 101 MB and some change.

If you're families are consistently in the 300 KB - 800 KB range, you're not going to have a problem.

Hope that helps.

[SteveKStafford · Accepted solution]

You can use Purge Unused on a family too, assuming Revit finds anything that it thinks can be purged. A family can inherit size from imported CAD data and nested families too. Importing and exploding a CAD source file will add object style sub-categories, line patterns, materials, fill patterns, text styles etc. There may not be any in the family right now but if you didn't create the family from scratch yourself and know everything that it went through until you noticed its size, anything is possible.

I ran into some families recently that were all more than 15 MB each. I used Purge Unused and Save As to create a new family with a new name. Between both actions the biggest final file was about 600 KB. If you use Save As on a file and it only decreases in size by about 10 KB then it's about as small as it can get. That's just been my observation.

If I really want the original file name to carry on, I just rename it to something like MyFamily-temp.rfa and then rename the original and rename the new one to use the original name again. The key part is the Save As to a different name initially. I've never just overwrite the original though technically I suppose I could do that. I prefer to keep a copy of the original intact, just in case.

[neylaur]

Thank you Steve! It looks like the "Save As" trick works for project files aswell!! I was struggling with a one storey small house, without any renderings/in-place masses, purged file that was above 70MB in size. The file was an inheritance from a big 100MB file project. No matter what I did, the file refused to go below 70MB. After reading your post, I've give it a try and PUFF! the file srunked to 2MB! 🙂

Kudos to you! 

[SteveKStafford]

Yes it works on projects too. Keep in mind that save history is also lost along with a Save As. In practice most people are happier with a smaller file size than upset about not having the ability to roll the project back as far anymore. As long as you archive a copy "as is" using Save As is a practical fix. The file will probably regain some size pretty quickly as a team gets working on it steadily.