It’s now been over an hour after loading my 2023 Layout file with only two pages, just to update the scenes and re-render them. I do not have a slow computer and I’m not inexperienced. I’ve been using Sketchup since the earliest days. Please fix Layout. It is no longer professionally usable.
Share the LayOut file so we can see what you are working with.
I wish I could, but it’s private residential development, not yet approved. I don’t think my client would like me to share it.
Maybe you could share it with me privately. Maybe I can help you get better performance out of it.
I just saved the file as a 2022 and went back to that version. Much faster and more responsive. Not happy about just spending $600 on my subscription update and then getting a useless version.
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It shouldn’t be slower in LO 2023.
BTW, your profile says you are using 2021. Please update your profile.
Completely understand most of the stuff I’ve done for architects firms can’t be shown, even discussed, until they publish them.
out of curiosity, could we have some data about your sketchup file ?
its weight, and its statistics ? (how many lines, faces…)
Layout isn’t a rocket itself, but combined with a heavy / complex model, it can really become sluggish. And maybe a bit of optimisation could save your skin.
(I mean, rolling back to 2022 is doing it, good. but that’s a temporary fix)
3 extensions you could run to make sure it’s good. Some kind of spring cleaning if you will :
- Default layer geometry. It’ll make sure all of your geometry is on the default tag, while groups and components remains tagged.
- material resizer. it’ll tell you the size of your materials, and will allow you to reduce the really big ones. Most materials don’t need to be much bigger than 1000px. If you tell me you have a brick wall of 5000px, yeah, why not, it’s HD. now if it’s a door handle using a black material of 5000px that’s an overkill.
- CG impact report. it will show you components that you use a lot, and those that are super complex. Recently on this forum I checked a file containing a building, about 2,5M elements. there was a single potted plant on a table that represented 10% of the whole file. that’s a bit much.
Incorrect tag usage, bloated materials and over detailed components (thanks 3d warehouse) may cause lag. And maybe you computer is strong enough so that you don’t feel it in SU, but as you enter layout, you’ll start feeling it.
Most of these “issues” tend to build up as we work, especially when using 3dwarehouse models. you don’t know how they were designed, and often end up having to enforce your own proper design rules on them.
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And they solution to make LO super fast is so simple…Make the SU scene ‘flat’ in LO, so collapse the geometry to a 2d plane (as it looks on the screen). That’s all!
Could be easier said than done…?
Already we have this (explode the viewport) but it breaks the live connection to the SU model.
How to flatten and keep the live connection to the model - easy or difficult 
Just saying.
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What you see in LO is ''flat" already and I, but that’s (personal) would rather see a speed increase than the live connection with SU. SU exports 2d views and if you want so, you can optionally choose a 3d live connection between LO and SU.
ps: most of the time when a scene has changed I have to start all over again with dimensioning, so I personally don’t bother that ‘live’ connection so much.
I’ve thought that might be one reason PowerCADD is faster; moving content to PC effectively breaks that link, so breaking the link in Layout might help even the playing field.
What I’ve been playing with lately is to have a layer with the vectored viewport on it just for reference. I copy it and paste it into a new layer where I explode it, and turn off the reference layer one. For updating, just delete the exploded one, copy the updated reference and paste and explode again. That’s not too painful.
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Vectors also slow down the file, the best is to keep the viewports as a rasterized image, convert them to vectorial only to work on them, like adding dimensions, sometimes on the rasterized viewport is hard to get the correct snap, then make it raster again, convert them to vectors to export it or check the option of convert rasterized images to vectors when exporting.
Hahaha! I have exactly the same workflow! 
You’re right. But have you ever worked with LO when viewports are exploded? It suddenly is the most snappy software in the world. Yihaa! It’s just a quick win for Trimble to implement such an ‘optional’ workflow.
Flattening would totally work for 2d plans, but it would be a problem when a user wants to add dimensions to an isometric or perspective view. (The dimension would show the length of the 2d line, not the correct distance).
So the solution would be that 2d ortho plans could be flat and all others are non flat.
Or there could be a Render as Flat option in LO, a d dimensions would only be 2d (not a bad thing)
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One of the last times a fix for improving performance in Layout was implemented it made my own experience Layout worse.
I miss not having the rendering of objects and text when moving out resizing, especially text - when moving text I could align the actual text itself more easily when other objects when I could actually see it being moved.
How do you “flatten” it?
As if you explode your view. There are plugins inside Sketchup which can make your view flat…try that and import that geometry in LayOut. You will experience snappiness and speeeeeed!
it can take 20 minutes or more for me to move from vector to raster on a single sheet. I would never send out raster output for final drawings. It’s gotten so bad that I work in raster, then when finished, spend upwards of 3 hours re-rendering each page in hybrid or vector.
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What kind of model and presentation in Layout are you working on that it takes up to 3 hours rendering from raster to hybrid for each page !!
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