Why is My bluebeam So Slow

7/25/2017

Have you ever had a PDF in Bluebeam that seemed to take forever to load? Well this is most likely due to one of Bluebeam's default preferences (the render setting) that is supposed to make viewing faster, but typically slows it down. By changing your rendering settings in preferences, you can increase the speed at which your pages typically load. See below for details how to update your preferences. I have also included a couple other preferences changes I recommend.

Keep Beaming,
Ralph

Find Your Preferences

To access your Bluebeam preferences click on the big "R" in the top right corner and click preferences. Or type Ctrl+K.

Rendering:

For your rendering style, you can either choose 1) Wait for Completion, 2) Iterative Draw, or 3) Iterative Draw with Sweetener.

Wait for Completion (My recommendation) will wait until the document is ready to be draw in full detail before updating the page. This setting will take less time to load drawings and when they do load, the complete drawings will appear.
Iterative Draw (Default) will load some of the page before the whole document is ready and then load the rest as it becomes ready. This setting is a little slower and will load smaller pieces of the drawing at a time.
Iterative Draw with Sweetener is like Iterative Draw except it keeps the last few pages in memory once they have loaded the first time. Making it a little faster.

Navigation Preferences

Modifying the mouse scroll wheel to be consistent with the rest of windows I found to be really helpful.
Navigation --> Mouse Wheel --> Single Page Mode: --> Scroll. This will make the scroll wheel work the same whether you are in single page mode or continuous page mode. Now to zoom in and out, just hold in Ctrl and use your mouse wheel.

General

I recommend updating your username as it is tied to all your comments.
General --> User
I recommend your full name So "rkreider" becomes "Ralph Kreider"

Take some time to try out difference preferences to make Bluebeam work the best for you.
- Some other that I would recommend looking into are general --> Brightness
- Startup - Uncheck "Show recent files on open"
- WebTab - Uncheck "open PDf Hyperlinks in WebTabs"

16 Comments

John Ratlif

7/11/2019 09:58:34 am

My Bluebeam ran great on windows 7 but after upgrading to windows 10 and installing a fresh new release of Bluebeam the performance is really sluggish and often hangs

Charles R. Scales, Jr

4/20/2020 11:50:53 am

Loading blue beam is very slow. same as the comment above

drew

11/7/2019 10:57:58 am

New bluebeams sucks!

Jose

4/28/2020 06:53:56 pm

Trying to access Bleu beam remotely through VPN, blue bean works good when I'm at the office. when I try to access remotely from home connecting through a vpn, blue bean does not appear to open pdfs, I have to push the vertical tool space line located on the left side of the program an pdf finally regenerates, if I attempt to add text or anything to the pdf it does not show the change, making me think nothing was done, I safe the file, close it and when I open it again the revisions show.

is there a setting that I need to change ?

Michael link

6/8/2021 02:11:55 pm

Jose,
You may have to enable RemoteFX (even though its been depreciated since Windows 10 1809). Here's a link to enabling Remote FX, if you are unable to does so due to permission issues accessing gpedit.msc, ask you administrator to enable these setting in your companies Group Policy, or locally if there is not company wide group policy enabled.

https://knowledge.civilgeo.com/knowledge-base/enabling-gpu-rendering-for-microsoft-remote-desktop/

I've done this for multiple clients that were having rendering issues with BlueBeam, Revit, Enscape, and other similar applications with great success.

Robert

5/1/2020 01:52:59 pm

I just updated my blue beam about 1 month
It is terrible I try and open PDF file and I have to sit and wait
Is there something that I can change settings or is it just plain worthless

MarkS

6/10/2020 12:55:46 pm

New version of Bluebeam broke my PDF bids from Esticom. They just fixed it in 2019.1.20: https://support.bluebeam.com/articles/corrupted-text-when-creating-pdf-from-chrome-browser/

Quinn link

7/15/2020 06:39:00 pm

I am on 2018.1 and it literally takes me 10-20 min to open every time i close... I usually just leave it open and it runs great though.

Thing is Restarts are inevitable. HELP lol

Sam

5/10/2021 01:30:02 am

Basically unusable, 3-5min wait for every operation
I rather print things out and draw by hand

lizben consult link

7/23/2021 08:10:01 am

This is a fantastic piece! There is a lot of useful and valuable information in this article that I will save for future reference. Thank you for sharing this fantastic information!

Stacy Wilson Bus Crime Scene Photos link

9/9/2021 06:46:35 am

Your article is very useful and good in writing so thanks for sharing your views .
with us.

Josh

9/10/2021 12:07:59 am

My print dialogue window takes FOREVER to open. Ive tried the same PDF in adobe and the print dialogue opens quickly... i thought it must have been the printers (network), but its the only app that takes (im talking a minute or two) to open the print dialogue window...

Aneesh Kochukrishnan

12/6/2021 12:27:18 pm

This is a great article. Looking forward for more articles like this.
Thanks

mathewarkins1@gmail.com link

12/8/2021 03:38:13 am

Thanks for the share. Have Bookmarked your page.

Guy

10/26/2022 05:57:04 pm

Bluebeam prints files at 10 to 20 x their original size. A 200kb pdf with a single mark-up gets reprinted w/ bluebeam and it's suddenly 10MB. (Flattening is not secure). This is with standard 600dpi default settings.

Opening a file more than 1500kb takes forever on bluebeam. I agree w/ earlier comments, this was better on Windows 7.

Victoria Addington link

9/15/2023 08:17:32 am

I appreciated you pointing out that we increase the speed of Bluebeam by changing the rendering settings. My friend wants to opt for Bluebeam free trial. I should advise her to go for it to assess how the software works.

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