Performant Hardware

I spent all day yesterday in trains, which was unfortunate, since it was the most beautiful Sunday, and springtime is in full bloom. It also forced upon me some unfortunate comparisons of the Swiss and Italian train systems. Needless to say, I arrived later than expected.

Still, I ended up happily back in Verona, Italy, where I started seriously learning Italian two years ago, for a repeat visit to provide a Revit API training class to Steel & Graphics srl.

One funny thing about Verona is that it has almost exactly the same flag as Sweden, where I grew up:

Verona and Sweden's flags

It is also the city of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Maybe I can manage to get to Sirmione and the Sirmio peninsula today and complete the final training preparations there.

Meanwhile, here is a non-API related question affecting all Revit users from Augusto Gonçalves:

Question: To specify a new machine for Revit, what should I consider, i.e. spend more money on? Amount of memory? Speed of memory? Processor clock? Multi-processors? HD speed?

Answer: Anthony Hauck provides a very succinct answer:

In order, and dependent on how large the models you wish to edit are:

  1. More RAM
  2. Faster Processor
  3. More Processers
  4. Faster RAM
  5. Faster HD

For a more complete and long-winded answer, you may want to peruse the Revit model performance technical note pointed out by Martin Schmid.

It has been around for quite a while now and includes some detailed software optimisation suggestions as well, which are well worth reading and understanding for add-in developers as well as end users, including:

Note that this document applies to Revit 2010, although I am assuming that most remains valid for Revit 2012 as well.