hyperthreading and Revit 2013

[Jroper]

When we build machines, we turn hyperthreading off in the BIOS.  We normally run AutoCAD 2011.  But on a machine that is running Revit 2013 and AutoCAD 2013, does it make better use of hyperthreading?  Is it better in general performance for Revit or only for rendering, which we don't do a lot of?

[Lance.Coffey]

I would suggest testing both scenarios, and see which works best in your environment.

Hyperthreading will divide each processor/core into two virtual processors, which will double the number of "processors" available to programs. However, the performance of each virtual processor would be less than the physical processor. There is a tradeoff between the number of tasks that can be performed and the speed at which each task can be performed.

The following blog posting talks about some additional multi-threaded actions (beyond rendering):

http://revitoped.blogspot.com/2009/08/multi-coreprocessors-tech-note.html

Note: The multi-threaded commands noted are enabled by default in the current version of Revit (no need to manually enable as described in the link above).

While looking into this, I also found this interesting article that describes why scaling performance with multiple cores is not a straightforward task when dealing with non-discreet tasks:

http://redbolts.com/blog/post/2010/02/01/multi-core-scaling-of-the-Revit-Database.aspx

[Jroper]

Thanks for the reply.  The blog post was insightful.

Can you recommend a good benchmark program or script?

[loboarch · Accepted solution]

This wikihelp page lists the actions in Revit which benifit from hyper threading.

http://wikihelp.autodesk.com/Revit/enu/Community/Tips_and_Tricks/Performance/Multithreaded_Processes...

There is some information on benchmarking here.  I believe there is a script there that can be run.

http://www.revitforum.org/hardware-infrastructure/1063-rfobenchmark.html#post10372