Along with the development of the society, it flows out more and more high-rise, underground and large-space buildings, of which the fire protection designs are sometimes beyond the requirements of existing national fire protection codes of China. Therefore, the performance-based fire protection design of buildings has been getting more and more chances of application. Evacuation analysis is one of the key problems in the performance-based design. In this paper, the performance-based design of a large shopping mall is introduced, and a cellular automata (CA) based evacuation model, i.e. the CAFE model is used to analyze the efficiency of evacuation. Because the interactions among pedestrians and those between pedestrians and environment are quantified in CAFE model, the values of evacuation time obtained through the model are slightly larger than those of an evacuation software, Simulex, indicating that the CAFE model is to some extent more conservative and the analysis results are with higher reliability.