We have faced performance issues when opening electrical model files in OpenBuildings Designer from ProjectWise located on a remote server. It often takes longer than usual to open these files and sometimes leads to crashes too.
There are few important variables that control the Electrical database in terms of location and performance: BBESDIR : This defines the location of the OpenBuildings Designer Dataset under which the \metadata folder (the Electrical system level database) is located, which is required to run OpenBuildings Designer Electrical.
BBES_DBDIR : By default undefined, this variable can be modified to define an alternate location for the WorkSet database folder.
BBES_SERVER_LATENCY_SECONDS : This controls the timeout override for the Electrical database connection between the client (local machine) and the server where the dataset is located.
For the location of the dataset folder, the value of the BBESDIR variable should be assigned to a proper dataset location and folder structure. The default Workset’s database is a sub-folder named “_bbes” located where the registered DGN files reside, but BBES_DBDIR can be used to point to a different and/or central location instead.
Regarding the BBES_SERVER_LATENCY_SECONDS variable, when this variable is defined it overrides the default prescribe timeout period used to establish a connection to the Electrical database. This variable can resolve issues were the timeout is just beyond the timeout threshold due to network latency. The value is defined in seconds, so in order to avoid any timeout issue the value can/should be increased up to 30 or 40 seconds.