My office is a sole user of Revit MEP, and therefore will almost always have an architectural model (as well as structural, arch-exterior, site models, etc) linked into our MEP model(s). The problem is that we work on very large projects (typically 100,000sf to 1,000,000sf hospitals), and it often takes 20+ minutes to open many of our models at the beginning of the day. Our linked models from other firms will typically be 100,000mb to 500,000mb per model (after some amount of cleaning up). This has to lead to some people never closing their model in our office for weeks.
To my understanding, this slow down in loading and general work within our model seems to be mainly due to the linked models. When I open our model without loading Revit links, I can always open it in less than 2 minutes, and it is a breeze to work in. Our central server is also not located in our office since we have offices all over the US. We have accelerators in our local offices, but they do not affect the load times of linked models.
My suggestion would be that there should be an option to store (or cache) the linked models to be saved on our local hard drives. Most of the time when we open our model the links have not changed. But it appears that we re-download the gigabytes of linked models from the remote Revit server every time we open our model. If there are changes to the linked models, the software could identify this and download that particular model to my local cache (or even only download the specific changes rather than the whole file like how sync works).
I believe the whole idea of the local model, is to allow us to interface with a version of the main model on our server much faster than if there was no local model, linked models should work somewhat like this too...
