Instability in Revit due to low available RAM

2023-10-08

Technical Support

Low RAM can lead to instability when working in Revit.

Low RAM can occur for many reasons, such as:

Working for a long time in one session with larger models.
Models with many links where the combined memory requirements are above your memory availability.
Memory-intensive tasks such as upgrading or printing a large model.
Other processes running on the system that consumes memory.
Systems that don't mean the system requirements for RAM.

If you encounter getting low on RAM regularly in a model, then steps to limit RAM use or increase RAM capacity are required.

See the following help topic for Memory, hard disk, and graphics card recommendations: Improve Revit Performance

See the following help topic for Workstation Recommendations (including Memory Recommendations).
4GB of free memory (after launching Revit and opening your model) is generally enough to run Windows without too many problems.
- Running with less than 4GB available RAM can cause applications to stutter or be unstable.
- Available RAM can be found in the Performance tab of the Task Manager, and can also be found in the Revit journal which can be reviewed after issues occur.
Check the system requirements for Revit and have at least the recommended requirements. If you still have issues, you may need to add more than the recommended requirements to handle more complex models.

Memory swapping allows the operating system to expand RAM to Storage rather than limiting the system to solely physical memory. The operating system oversees the memory-swapping process.
- The swap should be turned on by default. While this can be turned off it is not recommended.
Since the system will use storage to swap RAM, running with little storage can increase the chances of problems when a program asks for memory. Therefore, cleaning and freeing up available disk space and defragment your drive (for spinning HDDs) regularly is recommended.
The swap disk will help prevent instability because memory is available but as the speed of storage is much slower than RAM, this can cause slow performance and hangs in Revit.
- Staying well above the point where paging occurs while working is recommended.
The “low on memory” error can also be due to a RAM issue. The Windows Memory Diagnostic scans RAM to detect potential errors.
Your Graphics card (GPU) will begin to use RAM and then your storage if it runs out of graphical memory, so a higher memory card may also improve memory issues.

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