REVIT drafting view performance

[matthew.shultzSZQLZ]

Our company is slowly moving away from AutoCAD to Revit for all of our MEP content. We are in the process of making installation details and single line diagrams in drafting views and noticing very poor computer performance when editing. This manifests as 'compute time' between actions such as copy, move, trim, etc. which heavily impacts drafting speed.

The view I am working in today has 1600 elements as seen in the snip below.

I tried deleting out the generic annotation families, which we use to nest symbols for pumps, valves, etc. without significant improvement. I also tried using the temporary hide feature to isolate areas, no improvement. The only thing that works for me is to create a blank drafting view and copy areas I am working on into and out of that view and the main view. When in the 'cropped view' there are no performance issues.

What I am stuck with is a hacked workflow. While I understand that Revit is NOT AutoCAD, the degradation of very basic 2D performance is not something we can compromise on as our company spends many hours in 2D drafting. The benefits of keeping everything in Revit are enough to overlook this issue for now, but I am wondering if there is anything else we can do to improve this efficiency.

Computer specs: i7 13700k, 32GB of DDR4 RAM 3000 MHz (issue with BIOS due to 13th gen intel is limiting here, but confirmed to be an issue on other computers), RTX 3060, M.2 SSD.

[hmunsell]

Is that an example of a DWG imported into Revit or something drawn in a Drafting view in Revit?

Not knowing what the detail that example looks like makes it hard to provide specific examples of what could be replaced by Detail Items 😉. Have you considered using Detail Items (not Detail Groups) for some content? 

[matthew.shultzSZQLZ]

Howard - typically this is something that would be fully drawn in AutoCAD and imported in per-page but we've been trying to move away from that. We draw everything in drafting views mainly using detail lines. I cannot share the diagram from the original post, but this is a similar one (see below). In most of our single line drawings the MEP equipment is either simplified to a box/diagram or in this case below imported as a symbol from AutoCAD.

I am not familiar with detail items (detail components?). We do use annotation symbols for the 2 and 3 way motorized valves in the pic below for example, which seem to have a similar function. I looked through the Revit documentation and tried a few detail items and they behave in the same way as our annotation symbols. Additionally I found this forum post below which shows that detail items have some limitations regarding text within the family. Not all, but many of our symbols have text.

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/revit-mep-forum/detail-components-vs-family-annotation-inside-a-famil...

[hmunsell]

The workflow you explained is not uncommon. You already have the details in AutoCAD, so why not use them, right?  But you have to remember that you're importing another file format into Revit and letting Revit translate it as best it can. The imported content needs to be cleaned up. In some cases, replaced with Revit content. 

In the example below, I would make detail items of the circled content. Those look like they're probably fairly standard representations of equipment and accessories. detail items can be created and stored in a library for future use.  anything that is used over and over could/should be a detail item. 

• https://help.autodesk.com/view/RVT/2025/ENU/?guid=GUID-40A09EB9-C28D-43D0-815D-18519042845D

In looking at some of these, I'd be willing to bet there is more detail and linework that is needed for the representation of the item. I'd recommend simplifying these where possible too. Some may argue with this, but I'd also steer away from using Detail Groups too. 

take a look at some of these classes from Autodesk University over the years...

• https://www.autodesk.com/autodesk-university/search?query=Revit+Detail+Components&fields.product=Rev...

[matthew.shultzSZQLZ]

Maybe I am unclear. The pump and chiller shown there are import symbols from CAD, but the other items circled are already annotation symbols. Is there a significant performance loss from using annotation symbols vs detail items? Even in views without imported CAD, i.e. only detail lines and annotation symbols, the performance starts to really fall off over about 600 elements per-view.

Yes agree, detail groups are good for other things but not in this case. No detail groups are used in our single line drawings. And yes, heard on the CAD importing. We have a process to do that and I'll go back through with a fine tooth comb to make sure they're not 'over detailed'

I'm more trying to figure out why we are having performance issues with these views. Even if it's just lines the performance suffers.

[ToanDN]

Create a plan view from any Level, open it, uncrop, set Display Model to Do not display.  Draft everything in there.  Duplicate as dependent and crop to create each detail.  This is way better than using drafting views because you have one comprehensive view with all details, and you can crop each detail using view crop region.

[matthew.shultzSZQLZ]

I have not found a one-size-fits all solution to this problem. However some performance issues I have been having were related to central model location. We have a company server that hosts this model and when more than one user is in the model it lags severely to work the whole element ownership/permissions thing that Revit does. The company server is approx. 350 miles and one regional server away from me, hence the lag. (My local ISP is Kansas City based, company ISP and physical location is Dallas). I've tested this with both large and small models. That issue manifests as lag between actions - every command in drafting will take approximately 1-5 seconds to commit as it pings the central to make sure I can edit, actually commit the action, then pings the central again to update the element ownership. 

I believe the best course of action to solve the issue above is to move to cloud based models, but am unsure if we would have the same issue. I'm not willing to test it on this project in particular but will test it in the future.

The actual model performance, framerate and time-to-commit actions, is still affected by the # of elements in a view. I tested this by saving a detached model onto my local computer and performing common actions. The performance is not snappy quick like it is in AutoCAD but it's acceptable. There are roughly 1700 elements in this one view on 30x42 sheet size including detail lines, annotation symbols, text, detail groups, and CAD import symbols. I can bulk select copy everything on the view and paste it within 1 second which is perfectly fine, and performing actions such as trim/extend to detail lines within the view is practically instant.