BIM 360 Desktop Connector - Extraordinarily slow

[Chad-Smith]

The performance of the Desktop Connector is very slow.

It's as though every single operation you perform within these folders needs to check the current state of the files within that folder. Sometimes, the folders disappear altogether, and after a short period of time they come back.

I'm doing some testing of possibly using Docs as a place to store Revit Content, with my Revit content manager add-in reading from this drive. This performs slowly.

The thing is, when taking the Desktop Connector Offline, the performance is great, both in the Revit add-in and browsing through File Explorer.

So this leads me to believe it's the Desktop Connector which is the weak link.

Ideally, I would prefer if I could always sync the content locally. And, for the general performance of the connector to not be hindered by what seems to be the constant checking for version updates.

Let's put it this way, other cloud drives like OneDrive or Google Drive do not suffer the same issues.

[patrick.beattie]

Hi @Chad-Smith,

Thank you for posting to the forum.  From your description, it seems like you have Revit content stored in a BIM 360 Docs project that you are accessing through Desktop Connector.  Is that correct?

You are only seeing the slowdown when you have it turned to Work Offline.  What sort of content are you storing in the Docs project?  Do you notice a slowdown if you only have a small number of files stored in the project?

Let us know if you  have any questions.  I look forward to your reply.

Best regards,

[Chad-Smith]

Thanks Patrick.

1. Yes, the Revit content is stored in a BIM 360 Docs project.
2. The slow down is only when the connector is Online. When Offline the performance is acceptable.
3. The Docs project only has the content, around 100 of them. So it's a pretty small project.

[jamesaustin2271]

Hi Chad,

Thanks for taking the time to give us this feedback, its always appreciated.

As you're hopefully aware we released the plugin as a preview, precisely because our first target was to provide workflow for desktop and BIM 360.  The first release focused almost exclusively on enabling workflow, and we prioritised that over performance for future updates.  Since we made the release at the end of February, we have turned our attention to that performance, and you'll be pleased to know we have been making progress.  We're in testing now, but we hope to shortly have an update that will directly address some of the 'online' slowness issues you mention in your post.

We wont be stopping there, so please make sure to register your email (if you didn't already, I think you have to in order to download) and you'll be notified when the next update is available, and for future updates.

Hope this helps address your concerns, and please keep the feedback coming - its exactly why we made a 'preview' release. Thanks!

J

[Chad-Smith]

Thanks James. That is great to hear about addressing the performance. Without good performance, features don't mean much.
I'll update this thread after testing future releases.

[patrick.beattie]

Hi @Chad-Smith,

I just wanted to follow up to see if the information provided by @jamesaustin2271 helped answer your forum post.  If it did, please select Accept as Solution on that post so that other members can find that answer as well.

If you have any other questions please let us know.

Best regards,

[Chad-Smith]

Hi James, I'm following up on the progress of speeding the performance up.

[mmermel]

Hey Chad;

We are experiencing terribly slow downloads with BIM 360 Desktop Connector, even when compared to C4R.  Desktop connector was just updated on the machines with fresh downloads from Autodesk.

We have 200 megabit download & upload speed on our internet here, with good internet quality.  Definitely cold data being pulled in, which we know makes a difference.

Have you found any better speeds since original posting?

Thanks

[Chad-Smith]

It seems to be a little quicker now, but is still slow in other respects like browsing a folder for the first time.

Also while in applications that browse the desktop connector it has troubles like pulling data such as file thumbnails.

I think a big issue for me at the moment is not being able to locally pre-cache folders of content in bulk. I'm definitely not going to open each file individually just to do this.

As I said in my first post, the desktop connector just lacks the basic performance of other desktop syncing tools.

[ilai_rotbaein]

Hi Chad,

Thanks for the feedback. The ability to pre-cache in bulk is the next step for us and already in motion so stay tuned for updates.

Ilai

[adrian_worboys]

@Chad-Smith   Have you found any way of improving this?  We are having a similar problem, especially when trying to open multiple revit sessions which are looking at the same revit link that is located on the DC.

Thanks

Adrian

[Chad-Smith]

@adrian_worboys The general performance while browsing and accessing files directly has certainly improved since.

But I've not recently tested it with many/large files and sessions as Revit links.

[jigarkumar.patel]

Hi All,

Is there any update on ?

We got number of Revit linked models stored on desktop connector and it takes ages to open our model.

If we work offline it works smooth.

I thought when desktop connector create catch first time it takes time but once it create catch it should run smoothly.

Let me know if there is any progress towrds

[lvthunder]

Same with me except I'm opening a DWG in Civil 3D.  The desktop connector popped up and in the progress bar it scrolled 33 times before the file started to download and show progress.  This was with a file I was working on yesterday (using the same computer) and no one changed it from then so it shouldn't have needed to download anything.  My file was 7MB.

[brenttY9XRJ]

same here. I know this thread was started back in 2018 - here we are at the end of 2019, & the transferring of files is crushing any usability.  Typically - I'm hip-deep in a project now, so this is really problematic. BIM360 has become a bit of an addition complication I have to work around. The principle is wonderful, but without the speed to transfer or automate the caching - it's problematic.

I'm also having issues linking BIM360 models to Navisworks BIM360. The online tutorial shows a workflow where you link to the local cache (again - transfer speed), but in doing so - what's the point of the cloud? Onedrive / Googledrive don't suffer like this. 

[rebeccadavidson]

Here we are in 2022 - people in office complaining about project migration to Autodesk CC. What can be done to improve this? 

[mmermel]

We found that better computers with solid state drives helped quite a bit.

[droman7HU5G]

here we are, a few weeks away from 2024 and still experiencing ADC app being slow and failing when uploading files via Windows Explorer.  Have we found any other alternatives besides getting better hardware?  The image below shows what I'm currently experiencing. 
 

All suggestions are welcomed. 
Thanks in advance

[brenttY9XRJ]

yeah - I've been crushed lately by the same issue.

In the cauldron of project delivery this makes me re-visit notions of using a different platform or workflow for hosting of information [BIM Collab?]. Stability is key to any large process, & we really need a stable Docs workflow if we're moving forward in this direction. I did resort to 'dragging & dropping' into Docs from the cache folder. A bit of double handling, but about the only tolerable work around.

[wizard_ettore]

My test systems:
Threadripper 64C, 265GB RAM, 4TB SSD
Intel 13900k, 128GB RAM, 2TB SSD

AMD 3900x, 64GB RAM, 1TB SSD

Internet connections are fiber between 300Mb/300Mb and 1Gb/1Gb. All systems perform equivalently, though 64GB RAM is a bit thin for Connector (it's perpetually stuck at between 50GB and 70GB of memory). We are on 16.5 as a company because going back down to 15.8 is a giant pain. So, "better hardware" doesn't matter (minus RAM).

The error you're showing is "normal" and will always happen; we got these types of issues since 13.1 (when I started dealing with Connector, so likely well before that) and Autodesk doesn't really care to fix it ... it's been 4 years of the same issue for me. If you don't babysit the app, eventually those errors will compound and force you to reset Connector and lose an unknowable number of files that will not have synced.

The alternative is to work locally and upload at the end of the day; works a lot better than Connector, but obviously requires manual work by users. Another alternative is to work from a local server and sync to something like Sharepoint with their tools. There's no "collaboration", since Sharepoint/OneDrive doesn't lock files that are open, so you'll get a lot of FileName_ComputerName.dwg type garbage since it can't merge changes.