Revit pauses (thinks about something) for a few seconds

[sthedens]

My users have started complaining about Revit 2012 pausing (Windows 7 spinning doughnut) for a few seconds. This happens periodically, like every 5 minutes. It doesn't sound like much as I type this, but it is infuriating as it does this 100 times throughout the day. It doesn't appear to be tied to any given action in Revit, panning, zooming, selecting... Only Revit users are mentioning it, so I believe it is not just an operating system/configuration issue. I've run Resource Monitor during a Revit session. Within the CPU category, the Revit process turns RED during the pause.

[david_peterson]

My suggestion would be to put a sniffer on that workstation to see if it's going out to check for license. Every time you go to touch an object, change an object.... Revit needs to verify that you can do it, it also need to check to make sure you have a valid license. If you're running stand-alone licenses, you can ignore this. This can get sticky if you have multiple versions of revit/acad, since the licenses are tied together. ie if you are running revit 2012 and acad 2011 it's looking for 2 separate licenses.
Just a thought.

[RobDraw]

Could it be "Worksharing Update Frequency"?

[patricks]

Ours has been doing this, but it's mainly on a current job with a fairly large file (by our standards) and also late in CD's. I have also chalked this up to having a 6-year old server (32-bit Server 2003 with only 4GB RAM) with almost-full HDD's. I think things will get much better for us once we replace this server with something running 2008 R2 64-bit with at least 8GB RAM and 15K RPM SCSI hard drives.

[sthedens]

I've ruled out the license issue (I was suspecting it as well). While I've installed Worksharing, it is not running when this is occurring. Son-of-a-gun, our server is also a 6+ years old running Server 2003 32-bit, 87% full HDD's. I've got the new server, just patiently (or not) waiting on the drives.

[patricks]

Yeah we're running an HP ProLiant from about 2006 or so, with two 250 GB 7200 RPM SATA enterprise drives in hot-swap bays, in a RAID1 configuration. Currently less than 50GB free, though I'd say that's pretty good for having it 6 years. We have a separate external USB drive for archived projects, though, which has kept the main drives from filling up so soon.