Excessive Model Loading Times

[Brent.Beckett]

Hi Guys,

I am part of the Building Services Team (MEP) for an engineering consultancy, and we are currently experiencing massive loading time issues for certain projects. When creating local files from our MEP central model, it can take 4-24 hours for the model to open. This is also the case for all other team members.

The projects we experience the issue on are all from the same architect. The setup procedure for our MEP central model is linking the architectural model into our template, and copy monitor over common elements such as grids and levels etc. When we link in the architectural model is when we start running into the issues.

As an example, the project is medium rise residential apartments (2 towers split across 2 stages) with common basements levels below both towers. The architect provides us their revit model with the below structure:

Main Central Model of the whole project -> Central Models of Stage 1 and Stage 2 linked into main model-> individual apartment types linked into the stage 1 and 2 models.

To then link into our model, we have to open the above central models, repath the links and set them to "Attachment" so they are visible when linking the main model into ours. When you combine the files sizes of the central models and apartment types, we are looking at 2.5+gb of architectural models.

I believe the size of the Architectural files (along with the linking arrangement) is why our models to hours load (our MEP model is only 150-250mb). Has anyone had similar issues or have any ideas on how to reduce these load times?

Any suggestions are much appreciated!

Thanks

[Alfredo_Medina]

Some things to consider:

1) Divide and conquer is always a good idea in large projects. If a project contains several buildings, separate each building into its own architectural model, with their correspondent MEP, Structural models, one for each building. Each building is a separate package, and all sheets for that building are made in its own model. Then use a Site Plan model to control location of buildings and overall drawings. This reduces the time it takes to open models, and eliminates the need to have all the team members working on the same model, which is also not recommended. 

The current setup is not efficient.

2) Make sure that computers have at least one quarter of available space, and delete often the Collaboration cache folder. If that folder is never deleted, it can accumulate a great amount of memory, not leaving enough space for temporary files that the computers need to open large models.

3) Divide the model in worksets, and use "Specify" to open models, which gives users the chance to close the worksets that they don't need.

[Brent.Beckett]

Thanks for the response Alfredo.

1) Agreed, separating larger, staged projects into separate models is definitely best practice and how we set up our projects (sorry, that's something I should have mentioned!).

2) To be honest I have never checked the collaboration cache folder, and definitely something I will keep clean going forward!

3) Yep, all our models and the architectural models utilise worksets that gives us the ability to check out the ones that aren't of use to us (again something I should have noted initially, my bad!)

For anyone else that comes looking, this is the solution we were able to come up with. It may not be the best practice, but it took the model opening time from 4+ hours down to around 10 mins.

The issue was the excessive amount of links into the architectural model, that was then being linked to our model (in this case, the individual apartment types). To fix the issue, we opened the Architectural model and bound all the apartment links to the model as model groups. Then removed all links from the model and purged. We also did this to the other linked model, ensuring that all models we linked into ours did not contain and linked files.

This adds approximately 1-2 hours to the model setup/update (depending on projects size) and made the architectural model approx 30% larger,  however it payed for itself as soon as one person opened the model. Now i need to create some form of script to make the binding process less tedious...

If anyone knows of a better or alternative method to achieving the above please let me know!

[Alfredo_Medina]

That doesn't sound right. How is the information from the architectural model going to update in your model now? The architect is the author of those models, and that information is going to change constantly. How do you get updates after eliminating the links?

[Brent.Beckett]

Unfortunately, when they send an updated model with new apartment links, re-bind them in the new model. Another 1-2 hours of manual work. 

I completely agree that it doesn't seem right, and a lot of extra work. But spending 2 hours doing the above is still faster than waiting 4 to 24 hours to open the model and 1 hour every time you synchronise. I am open to any alternative ideas as I also think this process is not great. But currently, its the only one I have found that works.

As mentioned previously, it is only this one architect that we have this problem with. All other projects have no issues.

[ToanDN]

Try Transmit Model tool on the architectural model and only include the view types that you would need (such as views for By Linked View setting).  Then link the result model to yours.

[Brent.Beckett]

Thanks!

I will give this a try, however i believe this is how the architect is transmitting the models already (minus the cleanup of views and removal of sheets etc.)

Previously I have tried opening their model and removed all views, sheets and purged all unused. In cases this reduced their model size by 50%, however it did not reduce our model opening times at all.