Our company recently switched from a Box Drive to using a VPN with a mapped network drive. I started seeing problems with file loading times and once a project was loaded I had trouble with “Loading Graphics for Plan View”. After doing some trial and error I found that it was my georeferenced PDF files that were causing the problem. Since they are stored separately it looks like TBC is resampling these files every time I zoom in and out and that is causing the slow down.
I have two questions:
Is there a way to have TBC load the files into memory so they aren’t being referenced over the network after the initial file loading?
What is a better file storage solution that will work with a VPN?
Great question.
I have the same difficulties. No answers here other than I deleted once I Vectorized the data, that obviously helped, but not when in the midst of working with the actual PDFs.
I have asked a contact of mine at Trimble to comment on this - however this is what I know / understand
The fastest read / write time will always be on your local computer. File service systems like Box, Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive etc. or Network Drives or VPN to a Network Drive will all be slower than direct Read Write. If the server is not local to the office you are in, it will be even slower because now you have Internet connectivity rather than Hard Wired connectivity.
Systems like Google Drive and One Drive and I guess Dropbox is kind of the same, allow you to work with your project on your local PC drive, but then sync changes to the Share Drive location. This is all fine, however they also lock files while they are synching them which can cause problems with Point Clouds and Image Files - because when you eg Import a PDF Page, it tiles the image and saves the image files in a folder first before displaying them ready to be georeferenced or placed etc. In that instant that they get created in a Share drive location, the One Drive / Google Drive etc. lock the files so that they can sync them which makes them unavailable to TBC as it starts to use them - you therefore have to stop the synching prior to using TBC so that this doesn’t happen otherwise images can not show up at all.
The image files (PDF Pages, Georeferenced Images) ass well as Point Clouds are all stored in Folders under the Project Folder. The data of these types is referenced into the project not stored in the project. The data is streamed into the project and updated as you zoom In / Out. The Images are Tiled (if you have tiling set in Support - Options - Images) so that as you zoom in / out the system loads higher or lower resolution images to save graphics regen times. When you are storing your Project on a Network Drive or Share Drive, this streaming in and out will be slower than read and write from a local hard drive - you may want to try no tiling of your images so that it is not trying to read and write different images all the time while working.
The TBC VCE Project File is loaded into memory on the local machine, so you should only see a speed issue when you do a Save and not when running daily tasks in the project. If you are running Point Clouds or Images they will perform better on the local machine rather than over a shared drive or network drive location - Images you may be able to solve with No Tiling, Point Clouds you may be able to improve by changing the settings for Point Clouds under Support - Options - Point Clouds - change the settings for the Rendering Memory Cache to a larger number if you have plenty of local RAM - this was added to allow people with non solid state hard drives to improve read write performance vs solid state drives which have much faster disk access times - this will be similar to what you are experiencing with a Network or Shared Drive so it may help with point clouds.
For Images try changing Support - Options - Images - select No Tiles and then pick a resolution that works for you - you may also find that Down sampled resolution may also help vs Original Resolution
Reality is working with anything other than your local machine will always be a factor slower or a multifactor slower than working local. You do have to weigh up the value in working in a shared location vs a local location against the speed of working when local.
Alan
this link may help you locally caching the files on your laptop or workstation
local caching of shared folders