Revit 2013 crash when saving to a network drive

[jcclow]

We have a 163MB Revit file that was originally created in 2012, that we are now accessing using 2013. We can open the drawing from our network drive and save the file once to the network, however if we try to save the file with the exact same name to the network a second or third time...or anytime after the fist time, Revit completely locks up and has to be force closed. This does not happen when saving to physical disks attached to the PC. Is anyone else having this issue and if so, is there a work around or fix? I have installed update 2 and the stability hot fix with no change in the aforementioned problem.

This is a brand new install on a new HP Z820. I'm waiting for my subscription manager to get me a login to my subscription so I can open a ticket with support, but was hoping in the meantime there was a fix.

Thanks!

[GlenR1234 · Accepted solution]

Its unlikely Revit is crashing, rather it is just taking a *really* long time.

Revit uses a mode called WRITE_THROUGH when saving to the network, this forces the server to request the disk, and the disk controller to write all data to disk before it returns. Revit saves synchronously, and because of this, it appears to "freeze" when saving.  When saving to local disks, it doesn't use this flag.

The effect of the WRITE_THROUGH flag means that the save speed of Revit is directly comparable to how fast the disks on your server are. We have a share on an Active Directory controller that is on a fairly moden IBM server with SAS disks and a 60MB Revit file takes about 50 seconds to save over the network. A 160MB file might take 2 minutes or more.

I suggest saving, then just waiting... and waiting.. and waiting some more.

Unfortunately there isn't much you can do to solve this. Some RAID cards will ignore the WRITE_THROUGH flag, but only if they have a battery backed cache. But even then, the WRITE_THROUGH flag will cause the server itself not to cache any writes.

Alternately, you can switch to a file share that is on a Linux machine, as usually the share is handled by a program called Samba, and by default it ignores the WRITE_THROUGH flag when requested.

If you are interested more in what the WRITE_THROUGH flag does, here is the Microsoft article on it: Caching behaviour

[jcclow]

Wow Glen, for your third post that's a doozy! Thank you for the excellent explanation. Once I get a chance to catch my breath after our 60% release, I'll try saving to the network and letting it run. In the meantime, working on copies on a local drive and then transferring them to the network works fine in my small group of Revit users.