Revit Model Performance Is Not a Magic Bullet

I get many opportunities to audit and review Revit project models. When I am approached by a company and asked people are invariably looking for that one thing that is slowing their model down. They want a smoking gun and I 100% understand. I like the quick fix, too.

Unfortunately, it’s usually not that simple.

I’m not talking about crashing models or corrupt views. That is often one or a small subset of bad elements that will keep your file from opening correctly (I’m looking at your Detail Groups). I’m talking about the general malaise that seems to creep into some models over time.

I am sad to report that the vast majority of the time, it’s not a single magic bullet, this is death by a thousand cuts that kills a model performance.

So what does slow down your model? Here are some things to look at:

• Clean up and remove your linked DWGs.
• Resolve the Warnings that indicate you have two things in the same place.
• Check out your views with individually hidden elements and find a better way to control what does and does not appear.
• Don’t overconstrain. I like that little padlock as much as the next guy, but the more locks you have, the more Revit has to think about.
• Are you using any in-place families? Make them loadable components, especially if you are using them in more than one place.
• If your design is settling down, it’s time to ungroup those arrays.
• Be sure to model judicially. Watch out for over modelling, especially in families. Only model what you need modeled.

Like I said, I wish I had a magic fix, but usually there is a handful of things that get in there and make things just plain slow. Good luck cleaning up and speedy modeling!

 

When I’m 64

Just a quick post.  Last week we had our monthly local Revit user group meeting and the discussion came up about 64-bit PCs.

I won’t go into the crazy geeky technical aspects of 32 vs 64, but the question was whether or not it was worth the investment using Revit on a 64-bit machine.

Unquestionably, yes.

If you are using Revit to do residential work, or something under, say 5,000 sf (I just pulled that number out of my… um… void) then you probably won’t see any gain from the different architecture.  With the size of projects we are working on (medium to big) my users who were lucky enough to be in the 64-bit pilot project group would cause me bodily harm if I took their machines away from them.

Less waiting and fewer hiccups with workshared models is the key.  The group with the 64-bit PCs reported zero out of memory type issues when trying to save to central or other memory intensive processes.  The poor 32-bit users… well, we had to gently nudge Revit to save sometimes.

I don’t have hard numbers about am0unt of time saved, but frankly I think that’s not important.  The users felt better about it and a happier model maker is a more productive model maker.

We don’t do much rendering, but doing our renderings on the 64-bit PCs is insanely faster than the others.  Not a huge selling point for us, but it might be for you.

Any new workstations we buy are 64-bit.  Now we just have to get out of this recession so I can buy some more workstations…