Revit hanging in Windows 7

[eric.piotrowicz]

So far I haven't been able to find any posts regarding this but I'm curious if anyone has encountered similar behavior. Recently I upgraded to Win 7 as a test pilot for the company. I have a project still in 2009 and others all in 2010. When I open both Revit 2010 and 2009 the second one that is opened will function normally for a few minutes and then it bogs down and gets very clunky for about 10 minutes. I have plenty of horsepower to run both projects but that second session will hold at 25% in my process manager. I have a quad core processor but it isn't spiking a single core it is just staying at a constant 25% for about 10 minutes and then everything goes back to normal and its fine again. If I have multiple sessions of either 2009 or 2010 open it doesn't lag at all, only when two different versions are opened at the same time.

This is an odd one but I'm hoping maybe I'm not the only one who has seen this happen.
Thanks:beer::beer:

[AP23]

This also happens when you open revit 2010 and leave it open for about six hours without working in it. I'm not sure why this happens.

[ws]

I am seeing occasional odd things happening in Windows 7 64 bit with Revit 2010 - slowdowns occasionally as though some heavy duty process is running in the background.

If you leave Revit 2010 running overnight, by morning there is always an error message saying that 'Revit 2010 has stopped working'.

I also sometimes see hangs which require a reboot when loading families, when browsing the family files, but I suspect this may be something to do with my Wacom Intuos 4 driver (Wacom make great tablets but their drivers can be the source of problems in my experience).

[eric.piotrowicz]

Interesting points. Unless its for rendering, I never keep Revit open overnight and I can't think of a time I was able to leave it sitting idle for any extended period. I have seen the occasion clunky family browsing but it has only happened a couple times.
It is like WS mentioned with a heavy duty process in the background but the strange thing is that when I check the process list to see what its doing, its Revit that is holding the largest percentage (that unfluctuating 25%) even if I'm not doing anything.

btw William, congrats on the 1000 post mark!

[ws]

Ooh, thanks I had not noticed :)

I've checked through all running processes as well and can't see anything so far which might cause that amount of slowdown.

Closing Revit and rebooting Windows usually improves things.

[patricks]

I haven't noticed any of these issues. I run Revit 2010 on a Win7 x64 machine all day long without issues. But then again I have 16 GB RAM. :D

[eric.piotrowicz]

Not that 16 gig wouldn't be nice but I've got 12 gig and watch my system resouces pretty closely and I'm certain that isn't the bottleneck in this situation.

[ws]

Mine is also 12 GB ram, on a Core i7 PC and I doubt if most of that ram ever gets used by Windows 7 64 bit, let alone Revit.

I've got a new overclocked Core i7 with solid state system drive on order and I'll be interested to see if Revit 2010 exhibits the same problems on a fresh installation.

[patricks]

Mine is also 12 GB ram, on a Core i7 PC and I doubt if most of that ram ever gets used by Windows 7 64 bit, let alone Revit.

I've got a new overclocked Core i7 with solid state system drive on order and I'll be interested to see if Revit 2010 exhibits the same problems on a fresh installation.

my system is two dual-core Xeon processors... could be that Revit just behaves differently with i7's. I know there have been major issues with iTunes in Win7 x64 with Intel P55-chipset i7 motherboards, while other processors run it with no problems.

[ws]

That's interesting, must look that up about iTunes on Core i7.

My second PC which also has Revit 2010 installed as a backup is a dual dual-core Xeon machine running iTunes on Win 7 64 but when the new PC comes it would become Core i7 also, running iTunes.

I remembered yesterday that I had not enabled the PerformanceOptimization switch in revit.ini for multi-threaded wall join cleanup... I've enabled it now - you never know :)

[eric.piotrowicz]

I've also come across the iTunes issue and resolved it by unistalling the other two programs that it automatically installs. Bonjour and something else, I can't remember off the top of my head. The issue did occur on Win7 x64 / i7 based machines.

William - What is this multi thread wall join PerformanceOptimization switch you speak of? I can't seem to find any info on it and digging through the .ini file hasn't yielded any results. I'm curious what it does and how it works.

Thanks

[ws]

http://images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/revit_tech_note.pdf

It is mentioned in the section on multiple cores, Chapter 1 page 4 I think.

You add a line to the revit.ini file enable multi-threading for wall junction clean-ups.

In the first release of RAC2010 it caused crashing but it was fixed in the first update.

[eric.piotrowicz]

Interesting, just made the change and restarted. Its good to see that they are atleast begining to let Revit take advantage of multi processor environments.

[ws]

Just reading this thread about Revit memory:
http://forums.augi.com/showthread.php?t=100462&page=2

I looked in my c:/Users/Myname/AppData/Local/Temp for Revit temp files as I've had a few crashes in recent weeks...

and there are hundreds :shock: of megabytes of Revit temp files in there.

Can't do any harm to clear them out and see if that makes any difference.

/later
... nah - most of them disappear when you shut down Revit and so appear to be truly temporary.
Curious though - for a 30 MB project there were 600MB of Revit temp files.

[eric.piotrowicz]

So yeah, i just checked that out and noticed that most of the files went away when I closed Revit. The odd part was just to see what happened I wiped out the remaining files and reopened the same project. It took nearly twice as long to open. You aren't alone with the bloated size though, I've got 2.3gig for a 141meg project.

[ws]

Interesting - presumably Revit is using the temp file as a cache, which is possibly why my new PC builder recommended a solid state system drive for Revit.

[eric.piotrowicz]

Once you have that new machine up I'd be interested to hear a review on that SSD.

[ws]

Will do.

However a direct comparison with my existing Core i7 will not be possible because I think they overclock the i7 to over 4GHZ, compared to my existing 2.93GHZ i7.

I'll be disappointed though if the combination of ssd and o'clocked i7 isn't a tiny bit faster ;)


Of course the biggest performance improvement which I switch in when doing lots of modelling is to go back to the 2009 UI :)

[mark.98140]

interesting thread, i have anew imac 27"with 16gbram running windows 7 and Revit 2010 will stop working when left alone for extended periods... it is a real pain... especially when rendering... would be good to have some feedback from the factory on this issue...

[cliff collins]

There have been rumors on this forum about a "memory leak" in RAC 2010.

We have not experienced it in our office, but a lot of other forum members have.

Autodesk does recommend the following:

1. Create new locals each morning
2. STC every 1/2 hour, locally even more often.
3. Cold-boot your machine at least once a day.

If left unattended for several hours, restart your machine.

This does seem to help.

cheers..........

[mark.98140]

too late for another patch prior to revit 2011, so lets hope they get it right in the next release... hmmm, why do i remember asking for that again and again..!

[martijnderiet]

Revit does use the tempfile as an cachememory. normally it grows to about 20 (!!!) times your projectsize. So, SSD's work perfectly for this, as they read the file much faster.
The problem isn't the filesize, if you have a few crashes the "bad" data tends to linger on in the tempfile that doesn't get wiped out. So there's a big chance that it will again crash. And sometimes, if Revit crashes under certain conditions, the tempfile doesn't get deleted and will really get enormous.

About the "crash after leave", I have the same problem. Only, with me it will happen after 2-3 hours. Which isn't that much when you first have lunch and then make some calls. Wouldn't be the first time that after that Revit completely freezes my system.
Hope they fix it soon!

By the way: I use Vista. Am about to upgrade to win7. Bit of a bummer, hoped it would clear that problem.

[ws]

Once you have that new machine up I'd be interested to hear a review on that SSD.

Well, new PC arrived, almost installed Revit 2010 (as posted elsewhere the license utility doesn't work with Win 7 64 bit) awaiting new activation codes so in 30 day trial mode.

The solid state system drive as well as the overclocked Core i7 processor (4.02GHZ instead of 3.07GHZ I think) does seem to make a difference to Revit performance.

All Core i7 machines are fast but this one is very quick - and extremely quiet.

Subjective, but I'd say Revit is smoother in operation - everything starts faster of course with the SSD. Makes sense to have that for the system drive and a regular 1TB hard disk for the data drive.

[trombe]

Well, new PC arrived, almost installed Revit 2010 (as posted elsewhere the license utility doesn't work with Win 7 64 bit) awaiting new activation codes so in 30 day trial mode.

The solid state system drive as well as the overclocked Core i7 processor (4.02GHZ instead of 3.07GHZ I think) does seem to make a difference to Revit performance.

All Core i7 machines are fast but this one is very quick - and extremely quiet.

Subjective, but I'd say Revit is smoother in operation - everything starts faster of course with the SSD. Makes sense to have that for the system drive and a regular 1TB hard disk for the data drive.

William,
man you like hardware don't you !! LOL.
Can you broaden out the spcs for that machine please, AND
Did you go and get an NVidia CUDA video card for that since the Quadro cards are now all CUDA as are the top end other beasties....gee even the FX1700 has CUDA now.
I am interested in the cpu specs, drive specs, motherboard, power supply, RAM generation..assume that is DDR3, and the power supply must be headed up to 700 w or even 1kw as the better cards draw well over 100 w each now don't they.. how is the board cooled ?

I am doing some long term background for the next machine and have been watching progress on the new Intel Gulfstream is it ? due out now ?
All this but Revit still freezes, crashes and the VM and Temp directory management stuff is still living 10 years ago.
Ya gotta have a sense of humour.
trombe

[ws]

I've attached a pdf of the basic specification given in the quotation - I changed the system drive to a 120GB SSD after chatting to them about Revit.

[martijnderiet]

Hi,

Kind of similar to my new pc. Only I choose 2 SSD's in RAID0 so the pc thinks it's 1 drive with double speed read/write. Also I backupped my data drive with another in RAID1 so this will be mirrored. And I have two ATI Radeon HD5870 1GB DDR5 video cards in crossfire.
All the other components are quite similar (and yes, that does require a 1kW power supply).

Have it running for a few days now and it's a beast! First time I shut it down I thought it crashed on my, took me a few times to realise that it's supposed to respond this fast. The only thing I find a little disappointing is the startup time: it takes a while to fire up the RAID-configuration. Still working on my first render, I want to benchmark Revit and Max against my old pc... (and that's a P4 single core so I'm guessing that'll be fun!)

[ws]

That's a cute idea - SSD Raid

I asked the manufacturers for their recommendation on Raid generally with Revit and they didn't seem to think it worth doing, for my circumstances anyway.

SSDs are nice though - the larger capacities get expensive but for a system drive 120GB is reasonable.

[trombe]

Hi,
thanks to you both for that.
Yeah am not surprised about the 1kw power supply. Mine is already 560w and coming up 3 years old.
I imagine that the Windows 7 issue/s have to be resolved for the April 2010 release of Revit whatever, because its now gone past entry level dates to mainstream and cannot be ignored so its only a couple of months to wait for salvation ?
thanks again
trombe

[cphubb]

Hi,
thanks to you both for that.
Yeah am not surprised about the 1kw power supply. Mine is already 560w and coming up 3 years old.
I imagine that the Windows 7 issue/s have to be resolved for the April 2010 release of Revit whatever, because its now gone past entry level dates to mainstream and cannot be ignored so its only a couple of months to wait for salvation ?
thanks again
trombe

Running Dual Core2 Extreme 2.5 or something W7 x64 8gb RAM. Nothing really special and Revit is running very fast with almost not glitches. I am getting some Ribbon disappearing errors but I suspect that is my Video drivers which I am haveing trouble with. Just upgraded this PC from XP32 to W7 64 and the difference is night and day on almost all accounts. (Upgraded the RAM as well from 4 to 8 ) Have not seen any of the issues described. We are even working on an MEP model over 100mb with major ducts pipes etc. Big slowdown on XP32 pretty solid on W7

[burke]

We solved this problem by un-installing I-tunes.

[btrusty]

Hi,

Kind of similar to my new pc. Only I choose 2 SSD's in RAID0 so the pc thinks it's 1 drive with double speed read/write.

dont know what SSD you chose, but most SSD do not support trim over raid (e.g. after 3-6 months they can/will bog down drastically.

[john.curschmann]

I write this as I wait for a 64 mb linked arch file to load, 43% 10 minutes so far, 2% of the processor & 36% of 8gb ram on a win7 x64.............. and crash, lovely