Save to Central Loop

[kevinw]

We are experiencing trouble whenever we get more than two people working in their own local files of the same central model. Someone working on 'Computer A' will get an error when saving to central that says "can't edit the element until 'Computer B' resaves the element to central and relinguishes it and you Reload Latest."

So we have 'Computer B' try to save to central and he gets the same error only it says he can't save until 'Computer A' does. Meanwhile, there could be a 'Computer C' and/or 'D' working just fine, or sometimes the loop involves 3 computers. The only way out of it is to have everyone get out of their local file, w/o saving if necessary, and have one person recreate the central file. Then everyone has to recreate their locals. After this happened a few times, we resigned to only letting two users on a project at one time. Not exactly efficient.

Details: All users on Win7, 64-bit. Intel I7 processors, 12 GB ram. Worksets enabled. One for each linked file and one for our work. I attached a screen shot of the error we receive. This same error would be seen on multiple computers referencing other computers and many times creating the “loop” I described above. I also attached a screen shot of the worksharing monitor. At the time this was captured, only CCI-REVIT2 was working in the file (he was recreating the central due to the looping problem). CCI-REVIT7 did not even have Revit open at the time.

I appreciate any feedback. Thanks.

[Jrobker]

Is your file server Novell or windows?

[kevinw]

Windows.

[Jrobker]

<homer> DOH <homer>

I was hoping you'd say Novel. We had those exact same issues that went on for 5 months everyday. In a 8 hrs day we would probably get 2 hours of work finished. And you know how much you can get done in 2 hours in Revit.

We finally figured out that it was the novel server. The instance we switched our server to Windows, it hasn't happened since and that was 2.5 years ago.

I would almost believe that this does have something to do with your server though. Perhaps reading/writing rights.

Just to make sure. You're not owning the worksets right, just borrowing?

[kevinw]

Yes, just borrowing.  Thanks for the info. I will check into the permissions again, but they have been set to allow all users modify rights on the shared folder.

[Chris.Aquino]

We have seen this type of behavior when multiple machines have the same user name. Even if the user name is changed in Revit Options, sometimes the old user name is stored in the Revit.ini which can keep triggering the error.

I would verify that all machines have unique user names in the Revit.ini's.

You can also delete the "USERNAME=" field in the .ini, and when Revit restarts, it should pull the username from the machine.

[kevinw]

Thanks for your reply.  I check all of our .ini files and they are all showing the correct username. 

[foutjm]

i believe this has something to do with Editing requests not being properly addressed. user A sends a request to user B and user B closes their file or crashes without addressing the request.. if user A,C,D,E try to sync at some point its going to tell you "cant sync because user B" still owns a few items.the kicker is the "place request" button pops up. so if other users jump on it and hit place request....the loop begins.  user B cannot get back in his local now and you have to resort to creating a new central/local files.

we turn editing requests (worksharing update frequency) to 60 seconds. if its on manual you will miss those editing requests.

other than that we encourage people to NOT use this feature for this specific reason. it gets even uglier on Revit Server.

[foutjm]

this problem is very difficult to reproduce on a new file. so maybe my answer above is incorrect. the reason i point to editing requests is because if i create a new local with user B as my username when the local file comes up it has unattended editing requests. that is IF i can create a new local.

[stearnskl]

We had the same situation today, user a/b as noted in original post. We looked at the editing requests, it appears that people will submit them but won't say anything to others. (Should mention this is in RMEP 2011.) So editing request are going "unanswered". After deny/retracting, or granting the editing requests we were able to get out of the dreaded save to central loop.