Improving Revit Performance when using local files

[Bastiat]

Hello,

I am working on a job with two other users where we all have saved local files synchronising with a central file.

Each day I end up spending a significant amount of time staring at a blue circle instead of actually drafting to get work out.

Is this usual when working with Revit?

My system details are as follows;

Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3770 CPU @ 3.40GHz 3.90 GHz
32.0 GB RAM
64-bit operating system

Does anyone have any idea how to improve this performance?

[Steve_Stafford]

How often do each of you synchronize? How efficient/effective is your network? Do you use Worksharing Monitor (available from the Subscription Administration Center)?

You should synchronize fairly often. I think about what I intend to do in the next quarter hour as opposed to what I will do all day. I "take small bites" of the project to work on and sync as soon as I'm finished with that... and "take another bite". If you all wait several hours to sync then you are asking Revit to reconcile hours of changes at one time. If there are four of you and you each wait fours hours that is sixteen hours of work when you all sync (4 users x 4 hours = 16 total work hours). It will take longer to sync the more people that sync simultaneously. Worksharing Monitor allows us to see who else is working on the project and if they are using sync or reload latest. If we see another user syncing then we can wait until they are finished to start ours.

Network bandwidth can impact your performance, hopefully it is gigabit as opposed to 10/100 etc. If it is sharing files as well as providing email services that's two different demanding loads that you are expecting of the server. If one user's computer is considerably weaker than others it too can affect the performance of the team, their sync will take longer and that affects the rest.

Part of the time we spend idling is waiting for permission (from Revit) to work on something. If you select the elements you intend to work on (take a guess if you aren't sure) and "right click > make elements editable" you can borrow all of them at once instead of selecting individual elements and editing them as you go along. Think of this as asking for permission once (for a lot) instead of asking for permission every time (individually) you interact with something.

[dhurtubise]

On top of what Steve mentioned i would also look at stuff like the model size, thew worksets usage and the number of warnings.
Model size: You are sending back & forth data, and when you sync you might be transferring a lot of data.
Worksets: They are great for selective openings, just open the one's that are needed
Warnings: When doing something Revit tries to see if it fixes one of them, the less the better.... of course 0 is great

[MikeJarosz]

Are all of you saving at once?

Revit can only update the central file with incoming changes one user at a time. If all of you save at once, Revit will have to queue the multiple saves. If you are last in line, you will have to wait for everyone ahead of you to finish before Revit even begins to save your changes. Try to stagger your saves. When a team sits together, just call out "saving". Everyone will know to hold off their own save for a while.

If the team does not sit together, invest in instant-messaging software. Eventually the team will develop a rhythm for saving. Remember too that every save you make is a reload latest for the rest of the team, yet another demand on the central server.

[Revitaoist]

Also, what is the write speed of your server? Are you using a RAID? You can upgrade your server to SSD for faster write speeds. Disk drives usually bottleneck the speed for saving information.