Optimize BIM 360 Docs Mobile Sync Performance

[ljandreychuk_pcl_com]

The current design of the BIM 360 Docs app offline file sync process results in longer than necessary file sync times on the BIM 360 iOS app. The app currently re-syncs each file, even if no changes have been made either to the web or the iPad copies. A recent explanation from Autodesk was as follows:

"When updating an already downloaded folder, BIM360 iOS app marks all documents within this folder as "In Progress" even if their version hasn't changed. We will not download the document again if it's version hasn't changed. However, even if it has the same version, we still need to sync all of it's "attached entities" (Issues/Markups/Hyperlinks). As there is no deltas API to fetch these entities (at least not when this feature was added to BIM360), we are fetching those from scratch each time an update is required. 3 API calls per file will definetely be slow on folders containing a substantial amount of files. That's a minimum of 3 calls. If we have multiple pages in one of the "attached entities", there are more calls to handle this."

This design is causing delays when syncing an offline folder, with a significant impact on projects that have large numbers of drawings. We request that the design be changed so that only files that have changes, either directly to the drawing or related information (Issues / Markups / Hyperlinks), be synced. 

[lcollier]

This is a big deal for Large jobs especially with poor or limited Wifi - we need to be able to cache only syncing what is necessary when it is because you can't have devices out of commission for 4 hours waiting?

[ljandreychuk_pcl_com]

I'm happy to say that Autodesk has re-designed the BIM 360 app since my original post. The stability and performance we see in version 2.41 is far superior to how the app performed in spring 2020. 

[Anonymous]

I'm interested to learn how Autodesk has improved (per @ljandreychuk_pcl_com) , as we have not seen any difference in typical production work on BIM360.   Our load/ sync times for a major model are easily 15 minutes per operator, done numerous times during the day so as to both better collaborate and avoid work loss. @lcollier  - have you seen any improvement?

Recently our CAD/BIM manager worked Sunday night and was able to sync in <2 minutes.   Autodesk needs to dramatically up it's game with the AWS hosting parameters and provide the world class design collaboration it claims to offer.

[ljandreychuk_pcl_com]

On a site with over 6,700 drawing pages in the Docs Plans folder structure, what used to take 6 hours for a fresh download at approximately 100 Mbps now takes about 45 minutes. Refreshing the same set, with no changes to any of the drawings, (no net change) used to take 3 hours, now takes less than 1 minute. The time it takes to sync drawings and model changes certainly varies by a sites internet service and usage, but we too have experienced slow syncs that are not related to local internet service as well.