Number of Designers concurrently working in a Revit MEP model

[bmullen]

Is there any Autodesk documnetation (Whitepaper) that provides some background / foundational information around Revit performance and oncurrent usage. We are finding that themore engineers we throw at a model (in deadline) situations the slower themodel seems to perform (Open/ Save/ Sync) operations. We have seen models that take 5-7 minutes to open on a weekend take 45 minutes on a weekday. We have 10+ users pwrking in the model during the week. I am not a Revit user, I am the IT/ network guy. I want to provide the right infrastructure to my engineering team but if this is a Revit prpoblem I don't want to chase my tail looking for an IT solution.

We have a GB network

Workstations have:

16GB RAM + 2GB video card

SSD HD

i7 3.6 Ghz proc

If there's any documentation out there about performance degradation with numbers of users I'd like to reference it in internal discussions

If there are tips for how to aleviate these issues - I'd like those too. Already we are advising:

• Close unnecessary worksets
• Close inactive views
• Sync schedule - tarde 1 top of hour, trade 2 bottom of hour

My inclination is to recommend shift work when we have a this need to "throw labor at a deadline". If we need man hours - maybe they have to spread out more???

[CoreyDaun]

Sorry for the delay of response, but I am not aware of any specific documentation regarding this. Perhaps a general Internet search might yield some results?

Are your users "checking out" Worksets? If not, this may be contributing to the slow-down; when users are working in a Workshared Project without checking out Worksets, any elements that they attempt to manipulate will become "borrowed" which represents temporary ownership. Normally, there is no issue with a user borrowing the elements as needed and then relinquishing ownership when synchronizing with Central. However, this process constitutes each user's Local File accessing the Central File every time the user touches an element he does not own, which is all of them in this case. This means that all users are constantly accessing the Central File. When a user "checks out" a Workset, he preemptively takes ownership of all elements that belong to that Workset. So, using this method may increase performance by reducing the required and constant access to the Central File by multiple users.

[bmullen]

Thanks for the reply.

We can't Checkout Worksets as we have multiple designers form each Trade in the model at any one time. Checking out the Workset woudl make it unavailbale to others.

I'd really like to see Autodesk weigh in on guidelines/ rules of thumb for what is workable andd/or not workable interms of concurrency in a model.

[anil_mistry]

Hello,

You can find the Revit “Model Performance Technical Note” (white Papers) by clicking on this link: http://usa.autodesk.com/revit/white-papers/. Please, let me know if this document provides the information that you are looking for.

Thank you,

[bmullen]

I was  hoping for something more definitive but that may not be possible.

The White paper you reference recommends 200MB model as ideal size, we were using 500MB. What size do you typically see your models getting up to?

It also recommends model splitting by region (not trade) which would contribute to keeping model size down.

Thanks for this