Hi! I have an issue where generating a few simple shapes in a Tekla model saved locally on a physical drive takes milliseconds, but in a model saved on a network drive with the multi-user option enabled, it can take tens of seconds. I’d like to point out that both are clean models. Have you encountered this problem, and do you know if the model’s save location can significantly impact the speed of generating items? It’s incredibly frustrating when you test a script locally with multiple items, and it works smoothly, but doing the same in a collaborative model takes ages…
Model saved on network drive + multi user:
Model saved on network drive + single user:
Model saved on local drive:
P.S.
I copied the model from the network drive to my local drive, and it works perfectly. I really don’t get how network drive can cause that big difference.
Hi Aleksander,
Creating a shape will write files and modify the existing files in the “ShapeGeometries” and “Shapes” subfolders of the model folder. On your local drive these operations are fairly quick, but they will definitely be slower if the model is on a network folder. The speed is affected both by the number of files and their size.
Even with just a few shapes, what you’re experiencing doesn’t sound out of the ordinary. I can’t say if there are simple ways to improve your network drive access to make it faster, as this will depend on a lot of factors like drivers, network status, disk optimization or fragmentation etc.
One thing to look out for is how many shapes you have in total and remove ones that aren’t used by using the “Delete Unused Shapes” command from the Tekla menu in Grasshopper. This should speed things up since modifying the shape catalog will also access and check all the other shape files.
Creating model object types like beams and plates is a lot quicker since these will be saved in memory and only written to the file system when the model is saved (this is not possible for shapes). So depending on the shape geometry, some of the items that use these shapes could perhaps be created as other object types.
Cheers,
-b
