Tips to Make WebHelp Load More Quickly?

[alex]

A few customers have reported very lengthy load times for the WebHelp viewer to display completely (up to two minutes). They reported that items in the TOC display very slowly and that the process seems to hang at the half-way point while a running count of how many items remain to be downloaded displays in the browser status bar. It's no doubt frustrating to watch that number count down from 700 or so...

I tested a few of the projects listed in the forum and noticed several load very quickly and several load not as quickly At first, I thought perhaps there was a connection between faster display times and the absence of an Index or Search tab or the Quick Search in the toolbar, but this was not consistently the case.

Has anyone encountered slow times and found a way to speed up the process? *Is* it anything that we can control on our end? Our software runs on IE, so that's what our customers are using to view the help. And no, RamonS, we can't make them use another browser

Thanks for any help anyone can provide,
alex

[RamonS]

Well, much depends on the available bandwidth from the server, at the client side, and also between both. Do any other pages load quickly at the client side? I mean if the connection itself is slow then it is no wonder that the WebHelp is slow.
Why is your software browser dependent? If the pages comply with W3C standards any decent browser should have no problem displaying the pages. Web apps are to be coded to standard, not to some browser.

[alex]

Well, much depends on the available bandwidth from the server, at the client side, and also between both. Do any other pages load quickly at the client side? I mean if the connection itself is slow then it is no wonder that the WebHelp is slow.

I was told by our support person that it is definitely only a problem with the WebHelp. The other pages do load quickly at the client side.

I would love to hear from anyone who has experienced the same thing we are facing (and found a solution).

Thanks,
alex

[LTinker68]

Does it happen no matter which browser you use?

[alex]

The official word on browser use is this:

"[Our software] is supported for IE version 6 or higher."

We are still trying to determine how widespread of a problem this issue is. It could very well be a local issue for the sites who reported the slow display times.

However, if the problem is on our end, I'm looking for any obvious or not so obvious things that could be the cause. I just wondered if anyone might know, for example, if taking away the Index tab would speed up the display or if that would be completely irrelevant. Would it make any difference if we displayed the topic with the TOC pane hidden? You know, it's needle in a haystack time...

[RamonS]

I might just say that leaving the index tab out will speed things up as this makes less stuff to be loaded and rendered as well as less ECMAScript to be executed. Brings up another idea, are there any specialties about the ECMAScript runtime on the client end?
I don't know how accessible the web help is from the outside, but one of my tests is always to pull it up at home. Typically, it is fine then while it crawls in the office.

[Richard Ferrell]

The very first load of Webhelp after its been published to a server can be slow, but this would only apply to the very first view as the search and index is built, After that it will load quickly for everyone else.

[alex]

The very first load of Webhelp after its been published to a server can be slow, but this would only apply to the very first view as the search and index is built, After that it will load quickly for everyone else.

This doesn't seem to be the case for us. They have reported long load times, every time.

Since we haven't received many such reports, it may just be a problem on their end. I will report back if there are any other cases.

Thanks,
alex

[RamonS]

And what is considered "long". For some a second load time is too long, for others the limit is more around 30 seconds. This is somewhat subjective and difficult to determine when long is too long.

[alex]

And what is considered "long". For some a second load time is too long, for others the limit is more around 30 seconds. This is somewhat subjective and difficult to determine when long is too long.

I believe we were told it takes two minutes to load from the time they click the Help icon in the application.

(Yes, two minutes. Every time.)

[LTinker68]

You might also ask if they have anti-virus software installed. We have McAfee Enterprise here, and for some applications it takes a loooong time to load. It takes about 5 minutes for the Flare install wizard to appear and about 2 minutes for StarTeam (a source control program) to appear.

[Richard Ferrell]

It could be an issue with the way there server is handling Webhelp, how is the speed when they go to our knowledge base at kb.madcapsoftware.com

[forfear]

You might also ask if they have anti-virus software installed. We have McAfee Enterprise here, and for some applications it takes a loooong time to load. It takes about 5 minutes for the Flare install wizard to appear and about 2 minutes for StarTeam (a source control program) to appear.

wow thats a real speed demon i tell ya...haha..you can just smell the blazing trail its leaving behind ...:)aahhaha

[KevinDAmery]

I get similar zippy response with our Norton enterprise av software (of which I am most definitely NOT a fan). Sometimes it makes my dual core Xeon drive like a 386 sx.

[forfear]

Here's my tip: no one may have mentioned this.

Open the skin of the webhelp, and change any gradient colours for backgrounds in toolbar and navigation bars to solid colours.

After open the custom toolbar, and select and remove all the webhelp toolbar icons until you have toolbar buttons for something like

show TOC, hide pane, expand and collapse, sync output, and that's it.

this reduces the amount graphics prociessing of displaying gradients and reduces the number of toolbar commands that have to be loaded into memory.

[gingermc]

How can I remove the WebHelp toolbar icons I don't want? There are many images I don't want or need in the \WebHelp\Data\Skinagda folder after I generate my project.

The project is going on a CD, so I'd like to minimize its size as much as possible.

[Richard Ferrell]

you would have to manually go into the output and remove the images from your project, Or create your own custom skin, and then remove the other non-used skins from your project.

[forfear]

How can I remove the WebHelp toolbar icons I don't want? There are many images I don't want or need in the \WebHelp\Data\Skinagda folder after I generate my project.

The project is going on a CD, so I'd like to minimize its size as much as possible.

just curious

would we be shaving off about 50kb to 100 kb off the webhelp or
is this substantially more like ? I've never opened or checked the images but i thought these would be marginal, on a cd.

but i do believe removing commands from the toolbar would help save loading times if viewed on the net...from my personal experience...so yeah its the thing to do to speed up loading. Removing background gradients of tabs and panes (css style property in Skins) improves rendering speed as well on browsers.

[RamonS]

But is that really worth the effort in this case? It appears as that the shaving is done to conserve space. I don't know what else is on the CD, but it is just the help then having a 700MB available ought to be plenty. And if that is not enough I'd be looking at videos and screenshots to go and not some gradient image or a toolbar icon. And if it is just for performance reasons, I doubt that doing anything like that really matters when loading help from a CD. Maybe if it is just a 2x drive...
Maybe I misunderstood sth?

[gingermc]

The help is just a tiny part of what's on the CD. The CD will contain large amounts of data (several GB).

I don't see a need to include a bunch of images my help project isn't using. It would be nice if there was an easy way to delete from a project a toolbar image that I was originally going to use, but decided to replace with a different image. There's no easy way to delete the old/unused image. The way it works now, the webhelp includes the old/unused images in addition to the ones being used. It would be nice if Flare could be more intelligent when it generates webhelp. I guess I need to submit a request for an enhancement.

[RamonS]

Ah, OK, I now get the circumstances. The benefit of including anything that is in the project folder is that you can place any file within the project and have be included, for example a PDF, application files, or whatever else one can link to. The disadvantage is the situation you point out. If you think a list would be helpful to list all non-linked files currently in the project folder with an option to zap them individually, send a feature request to MadCap through this form:
https://www.madcapsoftware.com/bugs/submit.aspx