Thursday, January 10, 2008

Memory Management - Minimize Revit

There appears to be growing evidence that a simple task can contribute to improving memory issues with Revit. This POST by Scott Brisk at his blog Revit MEP outlines the evidence that he and Tony Isenhoff with (Eppstein Uhen Architects) have been studying.

Rodney Fiallo, a fellow Revit consultant observed this a month or so ago and mentioned it to me and we've been watching to see if it actually helps resolve a few memory related issues we seen when saving.

The simple task is just minimizing Revit and then restoring it.

Amended: Upon further examination I can't claim that it will resolve "out of memory" errors when attempting to STC (Save to Central). In an instance today I received an "out of memory" error when trying to save locally. It did permit me to do that. That is good, but when I tried to STC I received the error again. Hopeful that minimizing Revit would resolve that too...no joy! It did not! I was forced to close without relinquishing and re-open Revit to then STC. That did work.

I conclude that while the reported memory in task manager does fluctuate significantly when Revit is maximized and minimized it may not, in fact is likely not, to work in all cases. If you watch task manager you'll also notice that other applications behave similarly as well as subtle changes when a program is not maximized, just reduced in size on screen. I observed Internet Explorer 7 increasing in memory consumption as I've opened more tabs. In fact my poor old laptop has "hung" when I've worked in IE7 and used many tabs for a couple hours more often that I'd like.

6 comments:

James Van said...

Steve,

When checking memory usage by Revit, you have to make sure you're looking at Virtual Memory Size, not Memory Usage. To turn this on in Task Manager, go to View-Select Columns. When you have both open, you will notice that minimizing Revit (even just opening the Worksets dialog) will drop Memory Usage, but VM Size will remain unchanged.

James Van

Steve said...

Well that makes sense...nuts! Thanks for clarifying! Got a secret that we can use to reduce that? (that doesn't require killing me after telling me?)

Anonymous said...

My colleague came up with this one.

Steve said...

I think it has been established that it doesn't really make much difference.

RobiNZ said...

This article gives an idea what's likely going on. The "Memory" reported in task manager is misleading.

http://www.flounder.com/howbig.htm

Unknown said...

whether the size reported is real or not, the fact remains that Revit is a memory HOG. It will continue to grab excessive memory the longer it is kept open, and similar to many other AutoDesk products, it will not release that memory as you close files, but only upon exiting Revit.
It amazes me that just to launch Revit takes more that 1Gb before you even open a file. It really needs some attention.