Speed issues - should I upgrade

[devans]

Hi all,

I have been working in Flare 11 since 2010. I know - it's old! But it's been doing what I needed it to do up until recently, if a little slow at times.

Now the bigger of my two projects has grown to around 29,000 files. When I publish, it is 1.1 GB. My Images folder has around 16,000 images in it.

Every time I insert a new image or check whether a file has any linked files, it takes minutes. This means I am waiting for Flare to do its processing for many many minutes every day.

Building the project, which was taking around 40 minutes, suddenly ballooned out to 3 hours!

My question is, do you think upgrading to a more recent version of Flare would help with these speed issues? I am running Windows 10 and I am not having speed issues with any other software. My laptop is only about 3 years old.

Alternatively, is there anything else I could do to speed up Flare's processing? I have deleted the Analyser folder and turned off a whole lot of automatic settings.

Also my screenshots are all PNGs. Would it make a difference if I converted them to JPGs? I have tested the two formats and JPGs are smaller files.

All suggestions will be gratefully received!

Dora

[robdocsmith]

Just wondering if you are working on a network drive? I used to find slow performance whenever Flare had to build because of the network speed and the framework Flare uses. I changed to working from a local copy and that resolved my speed issues. I don't think network issues are as bad as they used to be, but I do still work locally
I've never worked on a system as large as yours though.

Rob

[devans]

Thanks, Rob. No, just working on my local drive. And I don't use any source control either; I back up manually.

[NorthEast]

If it used to take 40mins and now takes 3hrs, then I'd be trying to work out what has changed.
For example, did you add/change something in your project, or could it be an external factor like a virus checker?
Also, do you get the same issues other PCs?

It wouldn't harm to test it out in the latest version of Flare. You can download it and use it as a trial for 30 days.
But test it with a backup copy of your project though, as I'm fairly sure it'll update certain files.

If you're using Flare 11, that's from 2015 and isn't really that out-of-date yet. But if you're using a version of Flare from 2010, then I'd be more concerned!

[devans]

Thanks Dave. You're right, I must have updated to Flare 11 in 2015.

I don't really think anything has changed other than the project going over 1GB.

I haven't tried the project on other PCs as I only have the one but it's a really good idea to download a trial of the latest version for testing.

Thanks for your advice.

[doloremipsum]

Could be worth watching the task manager when you're building your project or doing other taxing operations and see if Flare is sucking up large amounts of RAM or something - if your laptop has space for an upgrade that might improve the performance.

For comparison, I'm on Flare 2021 r2 and my main project has about 23,000 files=1.75GB total, although there are certainly fewer images than you have. It does definitely slow down the more files in the same project - especially with searching for links and deleting files. My projects don't take long to build, but I'm never building the whole project so it's not really comparable.

One thing I've encountered that really slows down a file build is very large tables. I had a PDF that was taking about 15 minutes to build when I would have expected more like 4-5 minutes. Turned out it had a 50 page table, which I think Flare was struggling to build and paginate. I replaced it with 2 pages of instructions and the problem was solved But have you added any particularly long topics recently?

[devans]

Thanks, doloremipsum. I have looked at the task manager and it seems ok but I am not technical so I probably should get someone from our tech team to look at it.

I'm pretty certain I haven't added any large tables recently.

It's good to see that your project is also large. Hopefully my test of the newer version of Flare helps.

[Psider]

Asking your IT team about the virus checker is a really good idea. I once had a project slow to unusability and the culprit was a change IT had made to the antivirus settings. I think excluding the output directories from the virus check fixed the issue in our case (although it was a long time ago and I might be mis-remembering)

[devans]

Thanks Psider, good tip.

[devans]

Thanks again, Psider. Looks like it was the anti virus settings causing the main issue. Once I excluded my Flare project directories, the speed of Flare has gone back to an acceptable level.

However, it's also a good opportunity to upgrade my 5 year old laptop and update to a newer version of Flare.

Good to know though, that the size of my project does not appear to be causing an issue as it will continue to grow.

Thanks to everyone who offered advice.

[doloremipsum]

Great solution everyone, I'll keep that one in mind for the future!