Best practise to optimize Extensible Storage Functionnality

[pmeigneux]

Hello,

I currently use the Extensible Storage to add some new parameters.

It's work, but the size of my Revit file increases a lot, nearly +50% of the initial size in some case. 

I would like to know if there is some best practise in order to optimize the use of Extensible Storage from our experience?

Thanks for your support,

Philippe

[jeremytammik · Accepted solution]

Dear Philippe,

Thank you for your query.

This is a question that you can quite easily answer yourself, through the following steps:

You are aware of The Building Coder topic group on extensible storage:

http://thebuildingcoder.typepad.com/blog/about-the-author.html#5.23

As you can see from there, some very professional developers have dealt with extensible storage in depth, and the issue you raise has not been discussed.

Therefore, I would conclude that nobody else has noticed such a problem in the past and the answer is obvious, or at least unsurprising.

The size increase of 50% stems presumably from one of two possible sources:

• The data you added.
• The overhead to attach your data to each element.

If the size increase is significantly larger than the amount of data you added, the second answer must be the reason.

Are you adding small amounts of data to a large number of elements?

That would explain b.

In that case, you could reduce the overhead by adding one single dictionary containing all your data for all the elements, and using the element id or unique id to retrieve the data for each element from the dictionary.

Does that make sense?

I hope this helps.

Best regards,

Jeremy

[Revitalizer]

Hi,

I remember a Revit 2015 bug which inflated the file size significantly.

This was caused by adding lots of new Materials named "Standard", up to 100.000 and more...

If you use Revit 2015, it could be worth to take a look at the materials.

And, if necessary, to purge them before saving.

Revitalizer