Is it me? Or is it Flare 12?

[RamonS]

I'm on Windows 10 Pro 64bit edition, using 64bit Flare 12. I have a 512GB SSD, 8GB Ram, and Core i5.
On Windows 7 Flare 12 worked flawlessly for me.

What else have you running? 8GB is a bit meager these days...and Win 10??? Not ready for production use. There is a big update coming out in August, maybe that fixes the most fundamental flaws in Win 10.
Unless you find out what the issue is my advice is to roll back to Win 7 as soon as possible.

[ChrisBradley]

I'm on Windows 10 Pro 64bit edition, using 64bit Flare 12. I have a 512GB SSD, 8GB Ram, and Core i5.
On Windows 7 Flare 12 worked flawlessly for me.

What else have you running? 8GB is a bit meager these days...and Win 10??? Not ready for production use. There is a big update coming out in August, maybe that fixes the most fundamental flaws in Win 10.
Unless you find out what the issue is my advice is to roll back to Win 7 as soon as possible.

8GB is plenty of memory for me. With all my apps open and my largest Flare project open I'm only using 64% of available memory. Going back to Windows 7 isn't an option. Of everyone on our development staff only one application has been reported to not work well in Windows 10 - and that's Flare.

[davidfass]

Sorry, I don't know if this addresses anyone's issues, but I will mention it. I find that keeping the TOC open in the GUI kills the responsiveness of Flare in a number of areas, such as applying styles, inserting images, opening and closing topics, etc. Perhaps this is unique to my project, which is rather large with a long and deep TOC, but nevertheless it does appear to be a genuine bug (and has been reported). So if you are experiencing lags in the responsiveness of the interface, I would try closing your TOC. This doesn't solve all lags for me (still takes 5 seconds to open the Image Properties dialog, for example, with or without TOC open), but it does address many of them. For what it's worth...

[RamonS]

8GB is plenty of memory for me. With all my apps open and my largest Flare project open I'm only using 64% of available memory.

OK

Going back to Windows 7 isn't an option.

Out of pure interest...why not?

Of everyone on our development staff only one application has been reported to not work well in Windows 10 - and that's Flare.

I made other experiences, most of my apps and especially most of the hardware I have is outright rejected by Win 10. I guess our mileages vary. I also find the UI in Win 10 to be utterly dysfunctional, but that is personal preference.

[ChrisBradley]

Corporate IT decision I have no control over. I'm an early adopter and all my home PC's have been running on Windows 10 since it became available. Of the three PC's I've migrated to Windows 10 only 1 had a sound card driver issue that was easily fixed by uninstalling the Lenovo driver and letting Windows install its own. And while the UI isn't earth shattering, it doesn't get in my way.

[joy]

I still have some more testing to do to see if I can determine the root cause. I don't believe the issue is tied to analyzer or source control - I'm getting blank screens on projects not bound to Subversion, and all of my analyzer options are off.

I'm on Windows 10 Pro 64bit edition, using 64bit Flare 12. I have a 512GB SSD, 8GB Ram, and Core i5.

On Windows 7 Flare 12 worked flawlessly for me.

I have to mostly agree here, except we moved to Win 10 before we updated to Flare 12. My machine has similar specs to Chris's. I'm not getting blank screens, but keyboarding and mousing are both extremely slow (so far, it can take a couple of seconds for the cursor to catch up to the mouse action).

I also tried deselecting all the suggested settings in File > Options, and it hasn't made a difference. I have a large project (~3500 topics) and a large TOC, but I need my TOC open to quickly find what I need. Other team members aren't reporting the same issues that I see, but their projects are relatively small.

[Added note: I did just find a lot of high-cpu background processes that Win 10 runs by default. I'll clean those up first and see if that makes a difference.]

I'm holding out hope that Madcap can reproduce the issue because Flare 12 has a lot of new features that we can certainly use.

[joy]

Just to follow up on this thread, I finally filed a bug with Madcap, after trying many of the suggestions here. I've gone back to using Flare 11, which is much faster.

Flare 12 is unusable with my large project. I wanted to use so many new features, but I just can't work with a keyboard and mouse lag. Even my build time has increased.

I hope Madcap can identify and prioritize a fix for this issue; otherwise, my team (and our resellers) will also have to move back to Flare 11.

[gswart]

We're (myself and two other coworkers) experiencing the same mouse and keyboard lag. We're all working in different projects of various sizes. I've seen it in two of my projects. One has 161 topics and the other one is close to 1000. So far closing my TOC does seem to have made a difference. I can work with it closed, but that's not ideal.
Previously we had worked with Madcap's tech support on this issue but they kept having us try the same things over and over with no change.

[joy]

We're (myself and two other coworkers) experiencing the same mouse and keyboard lag. We're all working in different projects of various sizes. I've seen it in two of my projects. One has 161 topics and the other one is close to 1000. So far closing my TOC does seem to have made a difference. I can work with it closed, but that's not ideal.
Previously we had worked with Madcap's tech support on this issue but they kept having us try the same things over and over with no change.

Interesting that you're all experiencing it, and with varying project sizes. I also tried tech support's suggestions, with no discernible change.

Our Flare projects are connected to Git, and the SourceTree application (which we use to commit updates) slows down Flare 12 to a crawl. Closing SourceTree improves the response time a little, but messes with our workflow. (I'm working locally -- not over a network -- but any changes are registered in the SourceTree window.) Flare 11 works much faster, even with SourceTree running.

So, I'm hopping back and forth between 11 and 12, testing (yes, I'll probably regret that too), but spending much more time on 11.

[starrd]

We are on Windows 7 with Flare 12 and I have also noticed a super irritating keyboard lag that, at times, does not clear. Our project is large, perhaps 3000 topics, but I usually only have the Content Explorer and Project Organizer open. I find when I try to type a topic filename in the Quick Launch GUI, I get no response at all but cut and paste does. Similarly, typing in the Find/Replace dialog has no response but cut and paste does. My system has 16GB of RAM and I am often not running anything else while this is going on. Sometimes I have RoboHelp open or Photoshop, but that does not seem relevant. It gets "stuck" as if I have accidentally pressed a keyboard combo that locks out keyboard input.

We are migrating a team to MadCap Flare and this is going to be a PITA barrier to their ramp time.

Any other tips to try besides TOCs would be welcome.

[joy]

I find when I try to type a topic filename in the Quick Launch GUI, I get no response at all but cut and paste does. Similarly, typing in the Find/Replace dialog has no response but cut and paste does. [...] It gets "stuck" as if I have accidentally pressed a keyboard combo that locks out keyboard input.

We often experience that keyboard lock, especially in the Find and Replace pane. It almost always resolves itself with a Flare restart. I think someone on our team reported it as a bug a long time ago, but the behavior is hard to reproduce because it happens so randomly. (It also happened in Flare 11, so it's not Flare-12-specific.) It's just one of those annoyances that we work around.

[starrd]

It does resolve with a restart but that is a pretty cruddy solution. I wish that there was a "clear my buffer" option if that's what's going on. Sigh.

[ChoccieMuffin]

It resolves for me, but doesn't need a restart. You just need to leave Flare alone for a while while it "catches up" with itself. Which is a PITA if you've got stuff that needs to be done!

Another thing I've found with 2016 r2 is that Flare takes AGES to start when you double-click a Flare .flprj file - 20 seconds or more with absolutely nothing showing, so you click again, then it tries to open a second version and eventually tells you the project is open already.

[cfield]

I am also finding performance issues with 2016 r2 that I did not see with Version 12 with regards to loading a project (as indicated in the previous post) as well as when working in Flare. I am seeing a fair amount of lag time when entering information and it seems that when I copy or cut and paste I am getting spacing issues that need to be fixed in the Text Editor. Granted the project I am in needs to be "cleaned up" somewhat as it has content from previous authors, but it only has about 300 topics in it.

[ChoccieMuffin]

I am also finding performance issues with 2016 r2 that I did not see with Version 12 with regards to loading a project (as indicated in the previous post) as well as when working in Flare. I am seeing a fair amount of lag time when entering information and it seems that when I copy or cut and paste I am getting spacing issues that need to be fixed in the Text Editor. Granted the project I am in needs to be "cleaned up" somewhat as it has content from previous authors, but it only has about 300 topics in it.

It takes me almost a minute to open a project if I double-click a .flprj file. Very tedious. I also find that sometimes spaces don't show up in the XML editor, even though they're there in the text editor.

[johnnygreen]

I normally run Flare 10 on Windows 7, and HTML5 builds are quite fast. I tried the same project on Flare 2017. It took about 10 minutes, which is five times as long as on Flare 10. It also messed up the breadcrumbs at the top of each topic (this is a separate issue which would need more confirmation and investigation).

PDF builds seem to take the same amount of time.

I shall certainly be avoiding an upgrade to Flare 2017 as there seem to be more negatives than positives.