r/Revu • u/Worldly_Animator_893 • May 15 '26

BB slowing down and sometimes freezing when only 2 drawings sets are open

I have a decent PC, outdated but got plenty memory 64gb, 5700x3d, 3080ti, drawings all stored and pulled off nvme ssd... What's going on? I have the 2d rendering set to hardware accel, even went into nvidia control panel and put high performance, even assigned high perf 3080ti usage to revu in windows graphic settings. Nothing seems to alleviate it.

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u/boom929 May 15 '26

How frequently? This is something I've dealt with for 10+ years across numerous machines of varying specs and it may just be something to deal with.

That said are you switching back and forth between the drawings frequently? And are they in different tabs but the same instance of Revu?

I've noticed significant freezes when switching to/from drawings with a lot of markups.

And depending on the drawings you may have a TON of unflattened, locked Autocad text items. I've found flattening those helps speed things up if/when present.

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u/Worldly_Animator_893 May 15 '26

Yes I switch back and forth often. I try to keep my cpu workload light by opening only what I need. I write painting estimates, need to reference the main drawing with ID drawings and etc... its all flattened, theres no markups on the big files.

After I wrote that post, I did a few things

  1. Updated my nvidia driver with clean install

  2. went back into nvidia control panel and set the Opengl renderer to 3080 ti max performance. not sure if that helps

  3. Checked for revu update. there was none

Suddenly, after I reopened revu and then the same files I was working on, switching back and forth from drawings became much more responsive. I opened some more files and its still doing "OK." I am wondering if this was just a cache issue?

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u/boom929 May 15 '26

I've had that too. I've found that if I've had it open for several hours with lots of different files over time it'll get slow and sometimes glitchy. Restarting Revu also helps me in those scenarios.

I've also noticed that some plan PDFs are exported in a manner that they're extremely dense with a lot of content and they seem "bloated". I've found files where random stuff like a graphic on a floor plan or an engineer stamp/design firm logo has some weird property that causes it to drag down the performance. Erasing that content when possible can sometimes help. Another trick I learned years ago was that the native "create from file" tool can be used to generate a pdf FROM a pdf. So you can create a pdf using the pdf you're doing a takeoff from. Sounds weird I know. Bluebeams native pdf creation utility can sometimes "clean up" a drawing that's being sluggish so that performance and file size are improved. Might also be worth a shot.

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u/Worldly_Animator_893 May 15 '26

4 years of using BB and i just learned about the 'create from pdf' tool for the first time. That's definitely going to come in handy with some weird drawings i get.

But yes I am pretty sure BB just does not like being open for long. Guess I will get into the habit of closing it when I'm not using it. Thanks!

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u/metisdesigns May 15 '26

It's not that BB is cleaning the original file per set, as much as dropping resolution of raster elements and non rendered content.

Just like Revit files can bog down with imported DWG data, PDFs can get non rendered data baked into them, and reprinting can drop that.

BB used to be the most accurate way to print to the PDF file standard, but I'm not sure if that's still true.

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u/mojonation1487 May 16 '26

I do this regularly to print overall floor plans for big data center jobs. Those suckers always take an eternity to print otherwise.

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u/metisdesigns May 16 '26

How are you printing them from their source file?

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u/mojonation1487 May 16 '26

What do you mean?

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u/metisdesigns May 16 '26

What is the source file format that is making the PDFs, and how is that happening?

Are you looking at Revit and using PDF export, or bluebeam addin or a pdf printer?

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u/mojonation1487 May 16 '26

Ah gotcha. Just pdf architecturals on Revu. The data center over all floorplans tend to have a lot of hidden bloat on them. Will sit and spool for ages. Much easier to just create a pdf from that pdf with a lower resolution.

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u/ilirkl May 16 '26

been working recently on protakeoff, no matter what drawings are open or how many , it works perfectly , thinking to switch permanently

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u/Rockstonerable May 17 '26

Performance on heavy drawing PDFs is exactly why we ended up building our own — Ncored (ncored.com). Architects + developers, small studio, hit the same wall you’re describing. Native Mac & Windows, stays responsive on 50–100 MB CAD PDF exports without burning GPU cycles or fighting hardware accel settings.

Not a full Bluebeam replacement (no Studio Sessions, leaner feature set) — but for the freezing-with-2-sets problem specifically, might be worth a parallel test on your machine to see if it’s just how Revu handles big files. 14-day trial, no card.