Revit Arch 2012 model load speed question

[Kamil]

I have been receiving complaints from some of our users about their Revit models loading slowly. After hearing this complaint over and over I decided to investigate. I selected 4 workstations from our user pool with identical specs (same model, RAM, CPU, GPU, etc...) and identical OS image (Win7 x64). All four workstations are running Revit Architecture 2012 SP2. I then took a stopwatch and timed the load process of the same model (roughly 65MB plus 4 linked models under 30MB a piece). What I found was that 2 workstations took about 50 seconds to load the models while the other 2 took around 120 seconds.

Has anyone else experienced this problem? Are there any setting or options that can fix this?

[antman]

Any difference in network cabling/switches?

[Kamil]

The network switch was my first guess also, but I ruled this out after trying my test on both of our switches with similar results. The only difference between these workstations I can think of is that Revit could have been installed using different deployment packages.

[robinhill833400]

This may throw some light, although is in respect to loading the program rather than opening a file, but there may be a similar network overhead issue:

Compare my results on one machine with hard drive then changed to fast solid state drive..in both cases networked to 2 other machines+ internet link.

Loading Revit2012 took 1minute first time, then subsequent loads took about 27 to 31 seconds. This on a machine with a normal HDD hard drive.

I then swapped out the HDD for an SDD, providing significantly faster access read and write times.

Loading Revit then took 33.4 seconds first time, then subsequently about 24.4 seconds. Only 1.15 times faster on SSD compared to HDD

Compare this to the difference with AutoCAD 2012:
On HDD, second and subsequent loads took 38.5 seconds
On SSD, second and subsequent loads took 4.1 seconds
(first load took about 1 second longer)
9.4 times faster on SDD compared to HDD

Notably AutoCad then goes on to access the internet and network to open exchange

Whereas Revit has already accessed the internet/network once loaded.
This implies Revit is sitting around waiting on internet and network responses before completing loading.

If Revit was accessing internet/network after fully loading the main program as does Autocad, these figures suggest the main program was only taking 0.43 seconds to load on SDD...which I think would not be possible.

This suggests that Revit starts accessing the internet/network as it loads in parallel whilst waiting for network responses etc...
If that is correct it seems Revits load time is dictated by internet network speeds.

So if different machines on the network are configured differently in terms of network settings, or network hardware, load times will be different with identical machines.

Does anyone know if Revit can be set to access the network in the background, to avoid this wait state?

[jspartz]

The amount of RPCs being accessed locally (by pointing to their network path) adversely effects loading time of any model.

There's a lot of talk back and forth done online by Revit. You'll find in the 2012 ini the helpserver specified. In processes you'll find the Autodesk Infocenter (WSCommCntr), Autodesk Content Service (Connect.Service.ContentService), Akamai Netsession Client (netsession_win), and two that I don't think go online but might - Revit Extensions (AREXService) and External Library Wrapper (LibWrapper). These background services can hamper load times as well and can possibly vary based on logon or IP verses permissions and firewall settings causing a communication timeout.

Your best bet would be to view the Revit journal file after loading a file, which timestamps everything Revit is doing. If not there, use a packet sniffing program on the computer and sift through the computer's communication to find the stall, although the information you'll see there is very cryptic, even to most IT people.