TBC Corridor - Tricks to Speed up Processing?

Does anyone have any tricks to speed up corridor processing in TBC? I use the escape trick to cancel generating surface data but I am now at the point where I need to see this data as I make changes, I need to view how surface is affecting plan data, and wondering if there is a way to balance so I can get speed and this data.

I will say I am using surface instructions and conditional statements so there is some decent calcs going on in my templates.

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Just last season I was having the same issue. I had a long corridor project with 5 or 6 typical templates that changed back and forth dozens of times (using reference templates) and it would take 3-5 minutes per corridor surface to update. Everyone always talks about how you could theoretically model an entire roadway with just one template so I decided to actually try it on the other side of the highway. It cut the corridor surface regeneration time down to about 5 seconds for essentially the same length and complexity. I just put a “control node” 1 foot above of the CL not on any surface and used a table for the offset making it 1’ offset for typical #1, 2’ offset for typical #2, etc. Then a series of IF conditions to define each typical for when the control node is at it’s offset distance from CL. There were different end treatments on the left and right that varied independent of the roadway typical so I added a second and third control node for the various end treatments on either side.
It worked great and wasn’t as convoluted as I thought it would be.

i have started to use extract surface and use the breaklines for my instructions nodes. also, started use linestring from “side slope” command to use in my corridor. being able to use linestring to make quick change and see what is actually doing before adding it to a corridor should does seem better then using corridor to build your model. I just want to see a faster method to build subgrade.

That is interesting. Not opposed to combining but sometimes it makes it easier to work in segments. Kind of interesting that it was faster with all of those if statements. One would think that would slow it down because it is doing all of those checks for each scenario.

I am curious if you took that project and broke it into multiple templates how the speed would be effected?

By the sounds of it, TBC is processing one template and then moving on to the next instead of processing multiple simultaneously. In theory this should be processing all of them at once (with the obvious limitation of processing power). Multiple templates should be able to be calced at the same time right? This would even be true for reference templates.

That would depend on template transitions I guess.

I believe that TBC processes sequentially down the job because of template transitions - if you have one template then it processes sequentially through the instructions list.

One thing you should check.is the alignment based surface computations - this depends 100% on the alignment being 100% tangential elements - if there is a non tangent join between two elements then the alignment based calcs will fail and it will process a second time without alignment based calcs - this will double your processing time directly - check your alignment for tangential alignment elements (ie no deflection angles) and if you have any deflections turn off alignment based or fix the deflections to make processing faster. When building the model turn off densification and turn off alignment based to speed up processing. Reduce the number of corridor surfaces you are creating to 1 or 0 for best speed, and if you have built a cut fill map from the. Orridor set the build method to show empty or delete it when not needed as that will also get rebuilt with every change of your corridor.

Corridor will be fastest when it is not rebuilding surface models and when those elements are turned off. It is easy to forget that a change in the template happens pretty much instantly - it is the creation of the surface representation that takes time - if you have an interval of 5’ it will take at least 5x longer to build the surfa e with an interval of 25’ and 10x longer than 50’ - and that is compounded by alignment based and densification.

Alan

Alan

That is basically what I have. I did the westbound alignment first with multiple templates, then the eastbound alignment all with one template. They are not exactly identical of course, but they are very similar. On the westbound alignment I watch the progress bar at the bottom of TBC progress through calculating each template at roughly 10 seconds per template per corridor surface. When I rebuild the corridor surfaces on the eastbound alignment with just the one template (even though its much more complicated) it still only takes about 10 seconds per corridor surface and its done. I can upload the corridors for you to look at if you’d like.