Long PDF Build Time (v7)

[Robotman]

Is there anything I should look out for with compiling PDF in v7 that would change my build time from approx 5-10 minutes to 90 minutes? (yes, an hour and a half). When building it gets slow when 'creating chapters' / 'paginating' (and the compile of pages after that).

- I use Flare locally (with visual sourcesafe 2005).
- I have tried in Citrix as well (similar lengthy build time)
- It doesn't affect the smaller projects at all.
- The project is about 1200 pages in total.

I am going to do more tests (compile smaller sections of this project to see what happens, checking v6 again, etc.) and I will contact support after I try a few of my own tests - but just wondering if anybody has any suggestions to keep an eye out for?

Thanks,

[ajturnersurrey]

I have had problems with long build times in Flaare 6, which Flare support put down to network issues here at the time and I did not have the time to investigate further .... but they suspiciously affect one project in particular, which is not particularly long.

In my case the messages were coming back that the build was 'Done' in 30 seconds or so, but Flare would not then "release" and ask if I wanted to view the output for 15 or 20 minutes. In that time I could go to the output file and open it, and verify it had in fact been finished, but I had this long delay on Flare finally acknowledging it was finished. So when I wanted to build 30 of these in a row I was having to leave a build running overnight when it should have been possible to have it all done in 15 minutes.

Is this the sort of delay you are experiencing, or is it actually during the build?

[Robotman]

Is this the sort of delay you are experiencing, or is it actually during the build?

I didn't experience these delays in v6 - only v7, though, like you, it seems to affect only one project thus far (our company's largest one). My delay occurs during the actual 'build', but I probably won't get a chance to run my own tests until the weekend. I'll report back once I do some tests.

[RamonS]

Do you have realt-time virus scanning running against the output folder? It may be worth a try to exclude that folder. Maybe it is that the scanner has its paws on the files and Flare thinks that the locks are its own.

[LTinker68]

Also, do you have Capture files in that project? There was another post regarding problems with Capture, although there was a solution posted. I'm not sure what happens to Capture files (or other media) when you build print output, but to test, you could always conditionalize that media to not appear in the PDF and see if that speeds up the build time.

[Robotman]

Thanks for the suggestions.

We do have real-time scanning (trend micro) so I'll be testing the project at home in a guest and host env to see how that goes. We use SnagIt for our image capturing. I've got a high end gaming PC at home so I'll see how that takes to the PDF. Odd that it only affects the PDF and not the webhelp or word output.

[Robotman]

Tried it on my PC at home and it took 51 minutes to build a 1200 page project. Am just going to try it on v6 to see what happens.

[Robotman]

[Solved]

I have a single topic that contains 1 table that runs over 200+ pages. When I removed this topic from the build it went back to 10 minute build times.

Still, this didn't affect v6 build times. Thanks for all suggestions

[RamonS]

Gee, what is in that table? Or how small are the pages?

[Robotman]

Gee, what is in that table? Or how small are the pages?

Aside from my life's story, a shedload of preferences for our software. At the moment the problem is it's just number and name - no descriptions/options (which will probably bloat out the topic to 300-600 pages). And my preference is to put them into our app as a tooltip but first things first - get them all down first and deal with a better way of delivering the info later on. Always later Too many other things to take care of. One man documenter, too many projects. Wouldn't have it any other way.

[wbrisett]

Have you considered taking the information out of a table and using CSS styles to format the output instead? That may help. FYI, I have 25,000 topics in one project (register descriptions) and every single one has at least one table. I haven't built this project in Flare 7 yet, but I suspect I'll also have longer build times based on your issue. I have to build it next month, I'll let you know how that turns out.

Wayne

[Robotman]

Have you considered taking the information out of a table and using CSS styles to format the output instead?

Thanks, Wayne. This is on the list it's just a matter of researching it a little more (content over style is more important at the moment). We don't use tables extensively in the documentation so I imagine using CSS will be really beneficial. Cheers