If you are using or considering Revit Server 2015 for your live collaboration needs, consider this; a search on Google for Revit Server Problems produces about 6,210,000 results in 0.39 seconds. Revit Server is a free live collaboration solution for worksharing between geographically distributed teams. When evaluating Revit Server or re-evaluating it(if your already on it) you should be aware of the problems that come with it.
Workflow Problems
There are several issues that you will need to be ready to address with Revit Server. I would like to address a few of them here and hopefully provide you with some things to look at first. You want to remember that Revit Server is fairly demanding and picky so problems with it can be from anywhere.
Large Revit Files
Large Revit files can produce the error “The Revit server you are trying to access is not available due to a server or network failure. If you have models from the Revit server open, save any changes locally and contact your administrator.” Unfortunately this problem can be from a few things.
First check the latency between you and the other site you are collaborating with(use the ping command). Any latency over 50ms can cause some big problems. You will also want to be sure you have a stable 10Mbps upload speed and 10Mbps download speed at a minimum. Virus protection and VPN connections can hinder your disk access speeds; so it is important to check the settings on these.
Revit Server has a lot of patch work code which causes files being placed in different locations on the Revit Server. One of the more famous issues are the log file location in 2011 and 2012 products. Check the size and location of your log files, they can often get large over time(about 500mb) and take up disk space. Unfortunately these are only the more likely causes, there are a large number of other causes that you will want to look into, including things like Installation\Prerequisites, Initial Troubleshooting Steps, Revit Server and File & Printer Sharing Firewall Exception, DNS & VPN, Environment Variable setting, Revit Server Admin Access, Folder Permissions, W3wp.exe Being Created.
File Locking
Teams will come across the issue of random file locks. This typically happens as you are saving the Revit File or Loading a new one. The file will lock the team out of the model or lock them from accessing various components in the model. Unfortunately no one can work in the file till the lock is removed. If an interruption occurs during save this can break the transmission making it appear to Revit Server that the file is in use.
The lock will need to be removed from the Central Servers file structure directly(not via RS Admin Portal). If the lock remains once removed you may have file corruption. The result can mean you will have to create a new central file from one of the team members locals. Typical you will choose the last team member to make a successful save to central. This will mean all work by the all other team members will be lost from their last save point.
Corrupt Elements
When you receive the error “Element became corrupt at some time before this session” dont panic. This can be caused by a couple things, poor family creation, loading raw CAD files into Revit, or something more mysterious. There are a few things you can try Audit of the model, remove all files from their folders that are linked into Revit, attempt a backup recover. If worse comes to worse you can roll back and ‘save as’ under a new name and copy paste in new work. Unfortunately the team will be unable to work during this time.
Operation Can’t Be Completed
When a team member receives the “This operation could not be completed because of a problem in the Revit server network. Please try again.” message, there are a couple things you can try. First ping the Revit Server, the connection from the team members machine to the Revit Server could be down. Next check to see if the file is locked on the Central Server. You may need to change a workstations user name in Revit and access the Revit file as the locked user to break it lose.
Revit “Weight” Message
We are still waiting on an answer from Autodesk on this message. It will be in a message box and all it says is “Weight”. A solution thatv has worked, is to save the local file, close Revit, dump the temp folder, try again.
Operation Could not be Completed
The error “This operation could not be completed. Please try again.” is similar in nature to the file locking problem. Check latency and bandwidth between each site and if you are using a WAN Accelerator, try turning it off.