Reason for models to take hours to update to latest?

[Anonymous]

In BIM360 Docs / Design Collab when either publishing from revit or clicking the 'Update to Latest' we are seeing models taking anywhere from 20 minutes (once this happened) to 1 hour, or 4 hours (more typical) and even up to 12 hours to finish processing the update for our team to be able to package and share their model. This is a HUGE problem and time sink. BIM360 was supposed to alleviate the pains of model sharing, this has made it worse. Any useful thoughts or tips or direction would be greatly appreciated.

FWIW, the 20 min update was early and before sheets were added. once sheets were added to the publish set, it tanked and took 1-4 hours each update to latest.

Thank you,

-Mark

[scott.a.green]

@Anonymous 

There are a few different reasons why you would see long publishing times:

1. Network connectivity. 
2. Site downtime or maintenance.  See our Health Dashboard. 
3. Model Corruption. 
4. Model Size or number of views/sheets being published. 

For Model corruption - when you load the model in Revit, check the 'Audit' box - it may take a bit longer to load but will attempt to clear out any corruption. When it loads, then try purging out the unused elements, then re-save the model and publish back to the project. That should speed up the performance a bit if the cause was due to corruption. 

If it's overall model size or number of sheets or views. You can manage what views and sheets are included via your 'Publish Settings' or you can delete any un-needed views. The 3D views usually use up far more memory that the 2D sheets. You can also use the purge tool and 'Audit' for this as well as it can reduce the over all model data size. 

For any service issues, on the health dashboard you can sign up for notifications, so if the service is experiencing a slow-down your users can receive notifications and know to expect slower upload times. 

I hope this information helps. Please let me know if you have any further questions. If this answers your inquiry - please mark the post with 'Accept as Solution'. 

Thank you, 

-Scott 

[ErikFrandsen]

Agreed mrain - It takes our models 1+ hour to "update to latest" which becomes absurdly insane in a time crunch.  It is a limitation of BIM360  right now that I hope gets  a lot of attention.  We basically have shifted our whole workflow to "update to latest" when we leave for work for the day because we know it won't be done soon.  Also it will hang up at 60% forever which is confusing.  If we need to get something to our other teams quickly we just bypass the whole design collaboration module and directly link the revit file from BIM360 instead of using the consume method - which kind of sucks because we are pay $115/m to use all of it.  Can't sit there and wait on our software while we are expected to react quickly to clients. 

[scott.a.green]

@Anonymous 

I haven't heard back from you on this post. Please let me know if you have any questions. 

If the information I provided in my previous post helped to answer your question, please mark the post with 'Accept as Solution'. 

Thank you, 

-Scott 

[Anonymous]

Scott,

   I respectfully do not agree that this is a solution. It is merely excuses for a system and service that users are charged a handsome fee to utilize which now poses a delay in sharing of data and information. There are probably a lot of things happening behind the curtain, but it would be more useful for teams and users to be informed (read: given more transparency) as to all the happenings so that we can better setup our models, sets and number of sheets shared. In the previous iteration of BIM360 Team, our team did not experience issues similar to this time delay no matter how many sheets were published in a set. Thank you for the list of potential reasons, but it certainly seems to try and point the responsibility away from the service provider. Either way, there is hope one of our tower projects does not have to be on BIM360 for this exact reason. That, or the office will have to develop yet another workaround in order for the process to truly work for the AEC industry.

Also, I don't think the person who gave the response should be able to make their own post the solution.

Thank you,

-Mark

[scott.a.green]

@Anonymous 

Typically that is how our forums work - answers can be accepted by anyone in the community though we prefer that the person who authored the post marks the reply as a solution themselves. The forum moderator marked my post as the solution because they saw that you had not replied in several days and confirmed that my four points were the top known causes of the behavior you are experiencing. The moderator also recommends push the model more frequently - the individual updates would then be smaller and should take less time. Ultimately the size of the model and number of sheets/views will be the largest contributor to sync/publishing times. Though during times of service issues, or network issues with the ISP can also cause similar behavior as I have noted. 

As far as more transparency, any feedback to the development team is more than welcome. You can post directly to the development team via the BIM 360 Ideas forum. 

Thank you, 

-Scott 

[KyleB_Autodesk · Accepted solution]

Mark,

We continue to work to improve the performance of the translation time.  There's a number of efforts underway to bring down the overall duration of the operation.

As Scott mentioned, the single largest contributor to the duration of the translation process is the number & complexity of the Views selected for translation.  That represents the "work" that needs to be done before the model can be shared.  If you want it to be quick today, select a small number of Views with minimal complexity.

I understand the sentiment in your message though -> updating your design partners with your latest model shouldn't take hours.  That's why we have efforts underway to improve the experience.

In addition, you can always Live Link your models in Next Gen BIM 360, if you'd like that level of update frequency.  In that case, you'd never wait hours to update other teams.  That might not be viable in your Projects, but I wanted to make sure you knew that this method continues to be an option for you and your teams.

Cheers,

Kyle

[DWarren_CPL]

Quick technical question related to this post. When we set up our projects, we set up our print settings to print the default 3D view and the applicable sheets for the current set only. It still takes an unprecedented amount of time to complete the model sharing experience. 

My question is this: Does Revit have to process all the views in the model regardless of the project publication settings? Does Revit only process the views that are sheets per the publication settings? (views on sheets)? Would changing our publication settings to just the default 3D view improve performance?

[KyleB_Autodesk]

Sounds like you have more-or-less the right approach.  You don't even need the 3D View, as we already auto-generate the "Master View" for each model, which is the full 3D contents for each Phase.

One thing I suspect will help a lot here is the feature we're building to allow sharing before the translation is complete.  That would mean you could do a Package exchange in a matter of minutes, update the Links for any other teams that link to your shared Models, and then the team can view the data once the translation completes.  We're in the final stages of development on this, so it should hit Production soon.

Cheers,

Kyle

[toussaint.jimenezrojas]

I want to jump into this discussion, 

I believe the biggest problem Autodesk is phasing, is this idea of making a model Sharable throughout the Design Collaboration interface and access all the information over the WEB Interface, but at the same time, that model needs to be ready for the teams to link models and share information over the REVIT application.  

These two worlds right now are clashing together because of Firms and practice in reality use with more intensity the Software Application and share information over Hard Models, rather than the Cloud Translated model. 

Autodesk is trying to impose a workflow that is backfiring Because the busy work that firms do is over the REVIT application and linking models and updating models, rather than accessing information Translated from an RVT file to the Web Application. 

I believe this process should have to happen in two phases  the first one allowing the users to right away link models based on an update of the RVT file in the consumed folders, and the second one the translation of the Model to a WEB version for people not using the Revit app to access and see the model ( that is the process which takes a lot of time due the translation of the views, the geometry, etc. etc.)                                         

[grsEU6KR]

Is there any chance this auto-generated "Master View" is causing all elements to be processed in the publishing, and could be avoided?

Is there any opportunity to share before the translation is complete now? I can create a package prematurely but it only has the previous version of models until publishing is complete.

[physics2021]

I have tried:

1. clean up as much as I could all warnings

2. make sure all links/xrefs are all loaded as well as clean

3. audit & purge

but it take a 1.7gig file +14hrs to publish.

anything else I can do ? 

[rubenvivancos]

BIM360 model coordination has an option to upgrade the revit files to a version, not sure if it is only the latest Revit version available