System performance problem

[caddept]

I am having Dell Workstation - Zeon processor with 32 GB RAM and NVidia graphics card. I'm working on 160 MB Revit file. This system is taking 50% more time that I5 system with single core processor. Can anyone help me, how should I increase the performance in my zeon processor?

[mkotsamanes]

I will try and be brief.

Firstly, where is the file located? If it is network try and figure out a way to move local, if it is local try a solid state drive. This should speed everything up. But this of course doesn’t answer your question.

To answer your question;

Revit ‘IS’ a multi core program but multi cores don’t work in your favor for most part of any application. Think of it like getting some co-workers to help you solve a single math problem, you don’t ask 3 people to work together to solve 5+5. It’s faster for one guy to answer the problem and let the other guys start working on the next problem. Revit is the same there are some things it can ask all the cores to do (like bucket rendering) but there are other thing’s it can’t (like writing to the hard drive). The single CPU i5 system is actually going to be faster at hard drive type tasks because each available core is actually larger.

To make the issue even more complicated, with a dual processor system your ram is split between the 2 CPU’s (32GB is actually 16GB/CPU) this can (I might be wrong here) be partially resolved by enabling NUMA (non-uniform memory access) setting in your BIOS. I have tried on and off and currently run with it on. Everything I have read about this says that turning it on will make some programs faster and some slower.

I had the same reaction when I went from a (high GHz) duo-core laptop with SSD drive to a 2 processor Xeon workstation (24 Cores) with standard hard drives (my files are in the 130mb range). I took a large step which made this change less noticeable, I noticed it more significantly in Excel as I use some large Excel files on a regular basis and at the time I was not using Revit as much as I am now.

If you are want to throw money at the problem start with RAM and then an SSD, lastly a newer video card might help a small bit. If you want a free solutions, tweak the BIOS (change one thing at a time and test).

[caddept]

Thanks for your reply. But still the problem remains the same....

[rosskirby]

Taking 50% more time to do what?  

The RAM on your graphics card (GRAM) controls things like rendering and refreshing views, so if that's low (512 MB in lieu of 2 GB, for example), then you'll notice that it takes considerably longer to pan, zoom, etc., than it would on a machine with high GRAM.

If it's typical modeling tasks (creating walls, making groups, etc.) that seem slower, then that is probably tied to either the CPU speed or the number of logical processors.

Without knowing your machine specs, it's hard to pinpoint the issue.  I recommend running the benchmarking software from RFO (link) and posting your results so that we can better analyze what you're working with.  It only takes about 15 minutes or so to run.