Sunday, May 29, 2011

Great Discussion on Revit Server

So of late my post: Taking Revit Server "off-road" has proven to be on the of the most popular. It has inspired some great comments and discussion from several different people, and raised some really good questions about using Revit Server. If you have not gone back to see the comment thread, I highly recommend you do!

Some key highlights:

  • Q: Will Revit Server work better over slower connections then Citrix? A: Most likely it will perform better because for the most part RS has to move far less data then Citrix does on a per time unit basis (second, min, hour).
  • Helpful Tool! Rod Howarth has written a little app that can run on Server(s) to let you know when the server(s) is moving data.
  • Q: Does Revit Server synchronize all the data between Central & Locals? A: No, Revit Server should only synchronize data to a Local that has been called by a user connected to that Local Server. Keep in mind a call can be initiated by creating a local file, or via file linking.
          There is more in the comments, so take a few mins to read through.

In regards to the last question, I think it is important to keep in mind that the Central Server plays no direct role in the caching of data to Local Servers. It is the Local Server's responsibility to get data from a Central Server. The Central Server does not sit around "broadcasting" that is has new data, rather each Local Server queries the Central on a regular basis (computer time regular basis) to determine if there is new data that needs to be cached. A user choosing to SWC or Reload automatically trips that query and when a user is pushing data back, it goes both to their Local and the Central server simultaneously.

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