Build performance long documents in Office365

Post Reply
Jack Konings
Propeller Head
Posts: 29
Joined: Mon Nov 09, 2015 8:07 am
Location: Ede, The Netherlands

Build performance long documents in Office365

Post by Jack Konings »

Hello,
I was wondering about the communities experience on the performance of Doc-To-Help in combination with Office 365 (or M365 as it is called now).
Details:
Windows10, D2H 6.0.7222.18354
Project example: 26 source Word documents, output type: manual with master document of approx. 1300 pages, approx 21 MB
Until recently, we used Office 2010. Build of the Nethelp version took about 25 minutes. Build of the printed manual took about 1 hour and 5 minutes.
Lately, we changed to M365 (I think the Word version is 2019 now). The online build still takes 25 minutes, but the printed manual build takes about 4 and a half hours.
The processing of the individual documents looks fine. It's the creation of the master document that takes so much time, with or without fixing the numbered lists.

Did anyone else experience this decrease in performance?

Best regards
Jack
Jack Konings
Propeller Head
Posts: 29
Joined: Mon Nov 09, 2015 8:07 am
Location: Ede, The Netherlands

Re: Build performance long documents in Office365

Post by Jack Konings »

Just an update. I have the same performance problems when making a PDF of the manual when using Acrobat. So, this is no Doc-To-Help issue, but it seems a Word issue in M365.
Chainware
Propeller Head
Posts: 32
Joined: Tue Oct 27, 2015 2:09 am
Location: Dordrecht (the Netherlands)
Contact:

Re: Build performance long documents in Office365

Post by Chainware »

Hi Jack,

I have the same configuration as you have, Windows 10, M365, D2H 6, and my projects (re)build very fast, about a few minutes or so. This is for both NetHelp and Manual/PDF builds. However I dont use a Master project for Manual builds. I do use a Master project for NetHelp (having 11 childs) , and that goes fast as well. The individual projects are about 7 MB each.

groet Sjouke
Jack Konings
Propeller Head
Posts: 29
Joined: Mon Nov 09, 2015 8:07 am
Location: Ede, The Netherlands

Re: Build performance long documents in Office365

Post by Jack Konings »

Hi Sjouke,

Thanks for your reply. The fact that you use modular projects might explain the fast individual builds. The project files (.d2h) with which I experience the performance problem are each less than 5 MB, each project has 34 source Word documents of in total 23,7 MB. The final manual master document is about 21 MB. Everything, except for the templates, is stored on my virtual machine itself. So, there is not much network traffic.
Creating the PDF for the manual with the native function in Word (Save as PDF) is quite fast. (I do not create the PDF with Doc-To-Help, because I have to post-edit the output before creating the PDF).
For the moment, I blame the bad performance on the interaction between my Word installation and third-party add-ins, which grows exponentially with larger files. I haven't a clue what could cause that, but for the moment I have a workable work-around with build schedules at night and creating the PDF's from within Word.
Because I do not think there is a problem with Doc-To-Help itself, I think this thread can be closed. Of course, any hints on a solution regarding my problem with Word and third party add-ins are welcome :wink:

Thanks
Jack
Post Reply