Slow models and crashing files aren’t just annoying. They’re billable hours.

You’re used to it by now. The model takes forever to open. A file crashes mid-edit. Someone’s locked out of a drawing because someone else is in it. You work around it.

That’s the trap. A slow file feels like a small daily annoyance, so it never becomes the thing you call someone about. But it’s not small. Every minute spent waiting on a drawing, or redoing lost work, is a minute you can’t bill.

This is usually not a “your computer is old” problem, even though that’s the easy answer. It’s often how files are stored and shared across the network. For example, let’s say AutoCAD is slow to open a drawing over the server, or Revit crashes when it’s working off the network (the live file everyone’s editing together), or BIM 360 stops syncing. Those have real causes and real fixes. A generalist shrugs. We dig in, because we see these with firms like yours.

Here’s what’s usually really going on. Most of the time it’s one of three things, or a mix of them.

The first is the network. Big design files move a lot of data back and forth between the computer and the server. If the network is slow, set up wrong, or overloaded, the file feels slow even on a brand-new machine. The computer isn’t the problem. The road between the computer and the file is.

The second is how files are stored and opened. A Revit model that everyone edits at once needs to be set up a certain way, or it fights itself and crashes. The same goes for linked files and old data piling up inside a model. When the setup is off, the file gets slower and crashes more as the project grows.

The third is the machine, sometimes. A computer really can be too weak for the work. But it’s the cause less often than people think, which is why “just buy a new computer” is such an expensive guess. You can spend thousands on new machines and still have slow files, because the real problem was the network or the setup the whole time.

That’s the trouble with the easy answer. Replacing a computer is the most expensive way to find out it wasn’t the computer. We’d rather find the real cause first.

We find why your files are slow or crashing and fix the actual cause, instead of telling you to buy a new computer and hoping. So your team spends the day designing, not waiting.

Want to go deeper on the topic? Click here for a more in-depth discussion.

Tell us what’s been slow or crashing. We’ll find out why.