Central File is busy all the time

[twaldock]

We have been encountering a really annoying problem increasingly over the last few months:
Several of our users on one particular project get the "Central File is Busy" message even when no one is synchronising at the time. Traditionally you might get this message if you tried to synchronise when someone else was already in the middle of doing so. But on this project we regularly get the message when you try to do any command, even just selecting an object (I guess Revit tries to refresh the properties dialog box); the message might stay for 3 or 30 seconds, and will pop up again with the next command - so it effectively paralyses your workflow. Several people on the project might be affected, but not everyone. This problem is now starting to affect other projects, but we can see no real pattern to it. Our IT guys have checked for backups and other potential network glitches - nothing doing.

We have Worksharing monitor installed so that we can tell who/when someone is synchronising.
First encountered the problem on v2010, but its worse on v2011 (inc SP2).
All PCs running on 64bit XP with 8+ Gb RAM; although we are now switching to win 7.

Help. Any ideas? There is another similar thread in this forum, but its a different problem.

[Elmo]

Haven't heard of anyone else having similar problems to this. The file that your working on, was it Audited and purged after you had upgraded the file? Then made new local files from?

Is the network I gigabyte backbone with all the pc's and the server having a gigabyte network card. If not then you need to start looking at that aswell. Once you have looked at that, make sure your anti-virus isn't over scanning everything. They tend to be a pain if they are an on access scanner. If those are not the issues then, I wouldn't know where else to start looking. Possibly send a support ticket to Autodesk and see if they have information about this.

[bcgatti]

Is this a multi-discipline project? Are others linking in the model(s) that are showing this problem?

If another discipline is linking in your model, they tie up your model while it is being loaded into their Revit session.

[DaveP]

Check with your IT staff, too, to make sure that the "overnight" backups are not still running during the working day. If a file is being backed up it, sometimes that can lock out people from changing it.

[cdatechguy]

Had issues when there were too many error reports/warnings on the model....opening the central file directly and fixing a bunch of them helped improve the issue.

[twaldock]

Thanks for the suggestions.
This problem only happens on certain projects in the office, and not others (so it is unlikely to be backups, virus checking etc). It also only affects certain users, which implies that they have different access rights, or something in their profile or Revit install - but we can't pick it.

These are not a multi-discipline teams/projects, but we do have a lot of linked files, where other users might be loading linked files at the time the message pops up - so that is the best lead so far. We do have a system where all linked Revit files are in their own worksets, so we might try strictly enforcing the system of not opening those worksets unless they are required - that will cut down on loading links. We normally only do that when memory is a problem.