We have noticed that when placing ducts (round, oval or rectangular) we were receiving a significant delay while the tool processed the elbow VBA...roughly 10 secoonds. After comparing our dataset to the delivered Dataset_US, we noticed one catalyst was our large number of levels (which were prompting the warning about large level libraries). Since we created an "AECOsim-specific" DGNLIB with just levels for architectural, structural, mechanical and electrical (thus removing civil, landscape, survey, piping, instrumentations, etc.). The level number warning does not appear anymore and now we are seeing roughly a 4-second process time when the elbow routine is running, and this is common between the CH2M HILL datasets (for metric and imperial) and the delivered Dataset_US.
Question is...is this to be expected? We have users comparing AECOsim back to Bentley Building V8i SS1 and showing the process time was much quicker in that version. We have run all the VBA fixes as initially I was attributing the slowness to that, but users noticed that the structural tools that utilize a VBA routine are much quicker when compared to the mechanical tools. Also, the 4-second delay didn't seem to be there back when AECOsim was released earlier this year so we are wondering if with all the Microsoft security issues could something else have been corrupted? Note we have been testing from both within ProjectWise SS4 and by launching from the desktop.
We are launching from ProjectWise SS4, and the program association is equivalent to the multi-colour where it loads Architectural, Structural and Mechanical.
Brent Mauti
Architect, BIM Leader
CH2M HILL
Just did a test where from ProjectWise I unloaded Architectural and structural and have the same results. I did another where I launched from the desktop using the Mechanical icon and selected our PCF and got the same results.
OK, thanks for checking, Brent. Narrowing it down to loading one app vs. all is what I was leaning towards, only because of the additional overhead.
I just tried a quick test placing rectangular duct, and it's taking about 4 seconds for me to get from horizontal to veritcal, vertical to horizontal, etc, during routing. Can you try this outside of PW to see whether it's a factor in the 10 second delay you're getting? FWIW. I'm running Win7 64 on an 2.2 GHz i7 with 8GB RAM. My OS is fairly up to date, or at least I think it is.
My system is comparable to yours as well (just with 16 BG of RAM). The results are the same when launching from ProjectWise and when launching from the desktop. They are also the same when using the delivered dataset_us or when using the CH2M HILL dataset. (Of course this is all now that we created the specific DGNLIB as outlined below).
Interesting... and when using the delivered US dataset, is that stored locally?
yes...all local.