Compnents vs groups - how best to use them in large models

[ray_j_17]

I am building a project to try out some external software (capture nexum. its for lighting programming.) and have come to ponder a question, in the arena I have a good few thousand seats in the model. the other software can handle it happily, but sketchup is lagging rather dramatically when they are in view. I normally just hide all but the ones in the corners to allow me to keep editing but I’m wondering if there is a better option. I’m knowhere near finished but I can already predict the lag I will experience will be tremendous.

my main concern is the fact of the way they are layed out. there are currently lots of overlapping components (multiple instances of a component within a component) and groups within those components. is it going to make a major difference in terms of performance if I remove the nested components/groups, or would it not be worth it in terms of performance?

the current components - groups are as follows:
seating is in components of 12 columns by 16 rows. each seat contains 2 entities, a bracket group and a seat group.

stairs are positioned on ends or every 2 banks of seats in longer runs, they contain 14 steps with white strips and a single step for at the lowest level.

heres the model statistics:
Edges 958202
Faces 510208
Triangles 952530
Component Instances 839
Groups 6941
Component Definitions 36
Layers 1
Materials 13
Styles 1

[eneroth3]

I don’t think rendering performance is affected much by nesting. The only way the model hierarchy makes a different what I know of is that small groups and components can be rendered as boxes while the camera is moving to temporally increase performance.

Groups and components should make no difference when moving the camera around the model. However components are a bit slower to close as they need to redraw their thumbnail image.