We were recently consulted by a designer working on a large-scale piping project within Revit. The project consisted of numerous linked models, several of which were themselves substantial in size. When confronted with degraded model performance, the initial areas of investigation were hardware adequacy and model management practices, including the organization of linked files, workset usage, and overall project structure.
A series of standard diagnostic assessments was performed, and the workstation hardware was determined to be adequate for the workload. The investigation was then focused on the piping model in isolation. Analysis revealed that the primary performance bottleneck was not the linked models themselves, but rather the exceptionally high number of pipe elements contained within the active model.
Revit’s performance can degrade significantly when extremely large numbers of MEP elements, particularly pipe segments and fittings, are loaded simultaneously. This often manifests as slow regeneration times, delayed element creation, and reduced responsiveness during routing operations. In this case, pipe placement and modification activities were notably sluggish.
Two principal mitigation strategies were identified:
- Model Segmentation
Divide the piping system into multiple discipline-specific or area-based Revit models. This reduces the element count per model, improves regeneration performance, and distributes the processing load across a federated model structure. - Workset-Based Visibility Management
Organize piping systems onto dedicated worksets and ensure that designers load only the worksets required for their current task. By minimizing the number of visible and active pipe elements, Revit’s processing overhead can be significantly reduced, resulting in improved modelling performance.
The optimal approach will depend on project complexity, team structure, and coordination requirements; however, both strategies are widely adopted on large industrial facilities to maintain acceptable performance levels as model size increases.
In this video, we examine the second mitigation strategy—workset-based visibility management—and demonstrate how Revit performance can deteriorate as the number of pipe elements within a model increases. By progressively duplicating pipework and exponentially increasing the model’s element count, we illustrate the impact that large quantities of MEP objects have on model responsiveness.
The demonstration illustrates that Revit’s ability to process large quantities of piping elements does not scale linearly with model size. As the pipe count increases, model responsiveness deteriorates markedly, while hardware utilization remains relatively modest. This suggests that the principal bottleneck lies within Revit’s underlying data management, regeneration, and MEP calculation processes rather than the available workstation resources. In large industrial piping projects, this behaviour can significantly impact modelling productivity unless appropriate model segmentation or workset-based visibility management strategies are employed.
If you need help adopting the AEC Collection or Autodesk Forma in your practice or you are looking to invest in hardware, please contact Micrographics so that we may be of assistance.
