Friday, May 17, 2013

Revit Speed

No matter how fast our machines get, I have yet to have someone say "Revit is too fast"! It seems the opposite is always true. Well if you are looking for a lot of little ways to speed up Revit, here is a list of things to try. Some will help you and some might hurt. So one size doesn't fit all, but if you are looking for ideas.... here's some.

  1. Work in wireframe not hidden modes. You can use a very selective view template to set all your views back to hidden before plotting.
  2. Only open the worksets you need on open.
  3. Reload latest before you sync.
  4. Purge the crap out of all your linked Revit files.
  5. Compact your Revit files once a week.
  6. If you have a lot of people accessing the model at the same time, use scheduled times for syncing to prevent database collisions.
  7. The slowest machine accessing the central brings the whole lot down.
  8. Keep open views to a minimum. Just click close hidden every 5 minutes or so.
  9. Don't make or use over the top families that are over-modeled.
  10. Have only a generic drafting view open during saves and syncs.
  11. Check and clear warnings.
  12. Keep complex sketch-based items to a minimum.
  13. Break your model into smaller models and link.
  14. Restart Revit every 4 hours. 
  15. Work in dependent views instead of the overall view.
  16. Detach from central before printing.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Todd

Nice Little overview of the pitfalls in Revit
In regard to #7 could you please elaborate?
I have heard this "rumour" before and have on several occations confronted Autodesk people on this issue...also people in the Development team and they couldn't recognize the issue.
The only explanation they could see was that when you synchronize from a slow machine, the central file would be inaccessible during the slow synchronization.
Is that also what you mean with #7?

Anonymous said...

I have a question regarding point (9) on the list. Within the family if I add constraints (offset constraints) to move the Symbol Vertically and Horizontally does that increase family file size at all? I am talking about a basic receptacle or switch where on plan it moves the symbol position and keeps the 3D object that would be just a simple block extrusion.

Joshua S. said...

In a worksharing environment, a local file is pinging the central model to find out who owns what. The Worksharing Update Frequency happens in a range that may be set in your Revit General Options. Out of the box, the default is every 5 seconds. I recommend you set it to Manual updates only (such as borrowing elements or synchronizing). This option was added in Revit when view specific worksharing display settings became available. In previous versions, who knows how often worksharing updates happened? Your computer has to process the checkouts from the central database. Likewise, when you SWC to reconcile differences,a slower machine will take longer to save and refresh all the changes to the database. Remember, the changes between the local and central files are trying to update everything at the same time both ways. A massive amount of information may be sent back and forth when a SWC is done vs a Reload Latest, which just sends the changed info from the central to the local file.

Unknown said...

I would also be interested in more information on #7. can you point me to any information on this? We had a machine that ran extremely slow and whenever that person was working in the project the whole team complained. After we rebuilt the machine the project ran fine.