A feasibility study can grow to thousands of geometries as you test massing options and compare schemes. A few settings and habits keep a large Giraffe project loading fast and responsive while you work.
Keep your project within its size limits
Giraffe caps a project at 10,000 geometries. If you're studying a large portfolio or an especially complex site, split the work across multiple projects instead of pushing a single project past the limit.
Giraffe also rejects a paste that would push a single geometry, or the whole project, past its size limit. This usually happens when you paste in a very complex geometry or a large block of custom property data at once. Simplify the geometry or trim the data, then paste again.
Pause the engine for bulk edits
Giraffe recomputes flows and other calculated values every time you edit a project. If you're about to make a lot of changes at once, like importing a large batch of geometries or editing many features in a row, pause the engine first.
Click Pause Engine in the status bar at the bottom of the screen, or in the Flow Builder toolbar.
Make your edits. Giraffe will not recompute until you resume.
Click Resume Engine to pick up where you left off and recompute everything at once.
Turn off facade area topology when you don't need it
Calculating facade area gets slower as a project grows, because Giraffe checks every touching geometry to work out which walls are interior and which are exterior. Turn off calculate facade area in facade settings unless you need those numbers for a report.
See Manage Facade Computation for how facade area is calculated and where to find this setting.
Analytics recomputes every measure, not just the open tab
Analytics recomputes automatically as you edit the project, in a background worker so it doesn't lock up the interface. Every measure and category in the project recomputes on every change, not only the tab you're currently looking at. A project full of old, unused measures costs real time on every edit, even if you never look at them.
See Project Cleanup's Clear analytics action to remove every measure, category, tab, and custom unit at once.
Site-based measures are the expensive ones
A measure that reads site coverage, paved area, or landscape area triggers a full geometric comparison across every building, landscape, and paving feature in the project. Giraffe skips this work entirely when no measure needs it. Avoid adding a site-based measure unless you actually need those numbers.
Editing a measure or exporting can pause the interface
Editing a measure's formula, and opening the Export tab, calculate on the main thread instead of in the background. On a large project this can visibly pause the interface for a moment. This is expected, not a bug.
Grouping by a property with more than 30 distinct values only shows the first 30 groups, with a warning in the panel. The Urban Analytics tab is separate from custom Analytics. It automatically stops clipping overlapping areas on large projects and warns you that overlapping areas are being double-counted instead, so its numbers trade accuracy for speed on their own.
Adjust terrain quality
Terrain rendering trades detail for speed. A higher visual resolution takes longer to render on large sites. A larger tile buffer loads more terrain beyond your project boundary, which can slow things down further. Lower both if your project feels sluggish.
See Editable Terrain Options to change these settings.
Keep uploads lean
When you upload a project thumbnail, pick the smallest image size you need.
3D model and block uploads are capped at 10MB. Simplify a model before you upload it if it's too large.
Simplify geometry in a flow
If a flow works with complex geometry, high vertex counts slow down every downstream calculation. Use the Cull duplicate points node to remove redundant points from a geometry, or the Rebuild geometry node to reduce a geometry's vertex count by a set percentage.
Clear out what you don't need
Unused usages, flows, blocks, and scenarios build up as you iterate. See Project Cleanup to purge them in one click.