Revit Memory Usage and Performance

I read about this video on Erik van Eck's blog the other day. He's Dutch but he writes a number of his posts in English just for me! (not really) I try to read the other posts in Dutch and some words are more memorable than others, but I was only nine when I spoke it. A couple years since...have ... past...

The video is 14 minutes and 49 seconds (14:49) so you'll need to set aside a little more time than for my normal posts. It took me several days to get back to it to watch myself.

This video is from Microsol Resources and runs six minutes twenty seconds (6:20).

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.