Revit Freezing with linked files and upon opening

[Anonymous]

Hello, I've been using Revit for quite some time, though lately my Revit 2018 has been "freezing" a lot with projects with linked files. 

I have tried to change the compatibility mode for my PC to run this program.

I have saved the files with un-linking before I close out so I can open them. ( None of the files have worksets or anything linked onto them, when I open them separately; they SOMEtimes open.

But when they do work, it takes almost a lifetime for them to load.

Our IT guys have checked my system and it is running properly, but I am out of options of what to do. 

[Anonymous]

This could have a couple of reasons.

First would be hardware. Keep in mind that your system as a rule of thumb should have 20x the amount of RAM the size of the model is. This includes linked files. Having a model of 200MB will require 4GB of RAM to be workable. Add 5 links of 100MB and you'll need another 10GB of RAM, which adds to 14GB of RAM. Making sure that your system has enough RAM is vital with Revit.

Are you running the models from a network location or are all the models local on your PC? If the models are on a network drive, keep in mind that the network itself (and the server the models are stored on), can cause for a huge bottleneck. Networkquality and speed are key. If the models are on a server that is used for other applications which heavily rely on server CPU or have a huge networkload, your performance will be greatly affected by it. To rule this out you can relocate the model to your own system and see if the problem still exists if you run it localy.

If the models are stored locally, make sure your drive has a low fragmentation. Defragment your disk on a regular basis (unless it's a SSD. Don't defragment those). I use a free program called Defraggler, which keeps my disks in good condition. This helps performance.

Make sure no model has a linked file to a location not accessable for you. Revit will try to load that file, fail and that will take more time when opening.

This above is assuming you don't run Revit in a VDI enviroment such as VMware or Citrix.

[Anonymous]

I will check the RAM, but the files were downloaded from constructware, and are about 200,000KB - I have detached all of their links and worksets to try to make them smaller.

They are saved locally but I will have to look into hardware. Mine is currently 16GB..

[Anonymous]

If you only use them as links and not work in those files directly, you could also purge them in Revit, throwing out all unneeded/unwanted/unused information/families. Make sure you keep an original file for juridical purposes. The purge should clean the files and make them a lot smaller, if excess baggage is in the file. Keep in mind that Purge in Revit works a bit too good. If you work on a model, don't purge it blindly. You might end up removing an unused family that is needed in a routing preference of some system.

Worksets can be very usefull in large projects for performance. If a workset is closed, Revit doesn't load that information. This way you can work on portions of a big project, without the need of ultra heavy high end hardware. I tend to not discard worksets, as most people use them for some scope in their project or a way of filtering. It also makes it dead end easy to hide levels and grids from linked files.