Flare using HUGE amounts of RAM

[nickatwork]

Just wondering if there are any reported issues with Flare eating massive amounts of RAM? Mine is eating around 1GB and has crashed twice today. It slows down, and sometimes the RAM consumption will drop.....but 1GB seems pretty excessive......

When I open my project, 3 pages load, a single topic, my TOC and the start page. Without doing anything, CPU load is 50%, RAM is at around 200MB, and I'm not even doing anything yet.

My project has around 1200 topics, 2800 images, roughly 150MB in size.
Its running from C:\ on my machine.
PC is Core2Duo, and seems pretty spec'd up. Nothing fancy, nothing old school and rubbish.

[NorthEast]

I think Flare leaks a bit, as it seems to use more memory the longer you have it open.
I just checked my mine, after being open a full day it was using 470MB; so I exited and restarted Flare with the same project, and it's now only using 60MB.

Memory usage will also rise sharply during a build, by roughly 2-3 times.
I used to have memory errors during builds with older versions of Flare in Windows XP, but I've not had any recently with Flare v6 in Vista 64-bit.
I'm not sure if that's the new OS/PC, or new version of Flare, as I changed both at roughly the same time.

[Andrew]

Just wondering if there are any reported issues with Flare eating massive amounts of RAM? Mine is eating around 1GB and has crashed twice today. It slows down, and sometimes the RAM consumption will drop.....but 1GB seems pretty excessive......

When I open my project, 3 pages load, a single topic, my TOC and the start page. Without doing anything, CPU load is 50%, RAM is at around 200MB, and I'm not even doing anything yet.

My project has around 1200 topics, 2800 images, roughly 150MB in size.
Its running from C:\ on my machine.
PC is Core2Duo, and seems pretty spec'd up. Nothing fancy, nothing old school and rubbish.

The RAM *could* be a memory leak, though I've not had memory leak problems with Flare. I've not seen that from Flare in my largest projects, at least not for more than a few minutes. My large project of 7000 topics I leave open for sometimes over a week, and I've never seen anything like that (though there are very few pictures in the project, that shouldn't matter). However, the pegged CPU leads me to believe there's more than a memory leak going on. Memory leaks don't peg the CPU, generally.

What happens when you close and reopen Flare? Does this problem happen to you frequently -- if so, how frequently? How about rebooting Windows (yes, that age-old "I don't know what's wrong, but try rebooting" suggestion...sorry)?

[Craig.Prichard]

I wonder how much impact Analyzer's presence has on Flare. I suspect it frequently or constantly evaluates the current project to refresh its' metrics. Whenever I explicitly load Analyzer it always takes several minutes to refresh and the CPU spikes and the harddrive grinds during this refresh.

[rob hollinger]

Analyzer can be a cause on its initial scan. Once that's complete, it should no longer be an issue.
Flare maintains live links in its UI linking topics (files) to their condition settings.
If you have lots of topics in a single folder causing Content Explorer to scroll several pages, try turning off the Conditional indicators(located at the top of the Content Explorer window). You should see an immediate improvement in performance.

[nickatwork]

I've already done the standard turn on/off stuff, and the spikes dont happen when I open the project. Right now, I've got the project open, its using about 160K and zero CPU. But as soon as I start jumping around between topics and opening stuff up, RAM usage starts to climb, and it never comes back down, this means during the day of working on my project and opening loads of topics, RAM is constantly going up, slowly choking my PC.

I haven't run analyzer many times, its not something I keep open unless I'm trying to find a problem or want some stats.

The content explorer folder has all of my topics in it, everything in a single folder. This was not my intention, I wanted my content broken down into folders by the topic that they fell under, so there would be a similar folder structure to the TOC. Though I was told Flare didnt offer this during import. I will probably at least move them into there higher level folders at some point.

Guess its something I will have to keep an eye on, and probably quit Flare every few hours to keep things running smooth.

[RamonS]

When I see how much resources other .NET apps use as well you better get as much RAM as you system supports. It appears to be one of the many fundamental design flaws of .NET.

[SteveS]

Intellisense can use a fair amount of RAM as well, although I would have thought you would be typing something for it to have an impact.

[Andrew]

The content explorer folder has all of my topics in it, everything in a single folder. This was not my intention, I wanted my content broken down into folders by the topic that they fell under, so there would be a similar folder structure to the TOC. Though I was told Flare didnt offer this during import. I will probably at least move them into there higher level folders at some point.

Guess its something I will have to keep an eye on, and probably quit Flare every few hours to keep things running smooth.

I have a project with 7000+ topics. It takes up maybe 250 MB of RAM after using it for a while. I have as many as 500 topics in one folder, but not 1200...I suppose that might be the problem. I know scrolling around in my large folders is slow and sucks up CPU power, and adds to RAM, but not tremendously. You could try a simple test:
1) Backup your project.
2) Create several "dummy" folders
3) Divide your topics among the folders to see if that ends up helping the performance problems.

Have you contacted MadCap support about this issue? I would think they can help.

[enricosavazzi]

As mentioned above, Flare seems to have memory leaks. I usually restart it before generating the output of large projects.

If your project contains one or more topics with many and/or very large images (this is usually a problem with print output, rather than online formats), Flare may easily run out of memory and crash, even if just restarted. The solution is to split the problematic topic (i.e. the HTM file that stores the topic in the Flare project) into multiple topics (i.e. multiple HTM files), each containing a smaller number of images. For instance, if the offending file contains a whole chapter, split it into chapter sections (not Flare Sections, which are another thing). Only the first of these smaller topics, of course, will contain the chapter heading and will be marked as a new chapter in the TOC properties. This has saved my day more than once, enabling me to compile PDF files containing as much as 150 MB of images.

[Richard Ferrell]

Does this occur in just this one project or all projects?

[BruceMcNaughton]

Hi,

Glad to see this topic being discussed ... I see large memory usage ... I thought it might be Analyzer ... I think Analyzer also uses SQL Server which tends to bring in a lot of extra stuff too.. I can tell when Analyzer is scanning ...

Regards, Bruce

[Andrew]

The folks that are seeing memory leaks -- do you have Analyzer running? Because I can use Flare on a project for more than a week at a time (*large* projects), without rebooting or closing the project, and never run into leaks -- Flare never uses more than a few hundred MB of RAM, unless I'm compiling.

I don't think it's simple topic editing that's doing this; it would be helpful to figure out what's different here to pin down the source of any leaks.

FWIW, I use Flare mostly on XP Pro SP 3 (and Server 2003 terminal server, fully patched). I run with .NET Framework v4 and v3.5 (both fully patched).

[NorthEast]

The folks that are seeing memory leaks -- do you have Analyzer running?

I think Rob may have been referring to the Analyzer engine within Flare.
I do have the Analyzer application installed, but I don't use it (its performance with this project makes it unusable).

I've noticed Flare can get a bit 'greedy' with memory for a while, since around v3.
I'm pretty sure it must have leaks; I can't really see how you can re-start Flare with the same project, and reduce memory usage from 470MB to 60MB, with everything else being equal.

[Andrew]

I've noticed Flare can get a bit 'greedy' with memory for a while, since around v3.
I'm pretty sure it must have leaks; I can't really see how you can re-start Flare with the same project, and reduce memory usage from 470MB to 60MB, with everything else being equal.

I guess that depends on your definition of memory leak -- the traditional definition (where a pointer is deleted before the allocated memory is free) is impossible in a managed framework (such as .NET or Java).

There is a way to get a similar *effect* to a memory leak, and that is for the program to create and combine objects without ever releasing them, which means they remain "in scope" throughout the execution of the program.

As I understand it, there are three basic reasons for high memory usage:

1) The program actually needs all that memory for whatever it's doing. Hard to tell, but it seems unlikely that Flare needs more than a gigabyte of memory unless a) you are compiling (and probably not even then most times) or b) you keep lots and lots and lots of topics, graphics, etc. open in the editor. One further possibility is things like Content Explorer, depending on how Flare represents those things as objects, etc., could eat a lot of memory for folders with large number of topics.

2) Flare is allocating a lot of objects for something, and not properly ensuring they fall out of scope when it's done with them, so they sit there in allocated memory, of no real use, but cannot be freed.

3) Flare is using some unmanaged (i.e., not using the .NET Framework) code or library that has a memory leak.

That's why it's important to understand in what context this is happening, so we (or MadCap) can determine what causes it, and fix that.

[NorthEast]

Yep, I'm probably not using a developer's definition of a leak, I just mean Flare progressively eats more memory for whatever reason and doesn't seem to release it. You can close the project, so Flare is open with no project loaded, and memory usage still remains high (i.e. hundreds of MB).

[RamonS]

That is exactly the definition of a memory leak.

[RamonS]

I guess that depends on your definition of memory leak -- the traditional definition (where a pointer is deleted before the allocated memory is free) is impossible in a managed framework (such as .NET or Java).

Well, that is a bit overly simplistic. DotNet is written in C I assume and from experience with other .NET apps the runtime itself leaks like a sieve at times. Still, knowing the context is definitely helpful.

[KJohnsonDBTK]

Interesting thread.

I have a problem with a Flare project that locks up. Compared to previous posts, my project is tiny. Only 69 topics (stored in a flat directory structure under content) and 24 snippets. I don't use Analyzer. Other projects that are much larger don't have this issue. It is just this one.

After reading this and other threads, I've turned off conditional indicators in this one project. The immediate improvement makes me think that displaying the conditional indicators is the culprit. This small project is a master project that is imported into 3 other projects, so it has extensive conditions applied. When the conditions are displayed, Flare slows down to a crawl. It can't keep up with scrolling and typing, and eventually it just stops responding.

It will be interesting to see if Flare locks up as I continue to work with the conditional indicators turned off.

Good luck to the rest of you having issues
Kathleen

[lacastle]

most of the time, it makes a difference if you're working on a project saved in a network folder vs. a local folder. Local folders are SO much quicker. I keep my working copy in a local (c: drive) folder and back up every night to the network.

[nickatwork]

Interesting about the conditional indicators, I haven't even got any conditionals setup yet, so I'm not sure if thats affecting, though perhaps the option is turned on and thats enough to cause a problem....will have to check it out. thanks for the tip.
Nick

[nickatwork]

Well this is slowly getting worse and worse......2 hours of work this morning in Flare. A large project, but only about 10 topics or items opened at once. My main TOC always open so I can get my files quickly and in the order I need.

So far, its using 1.2GB of RAM and basically crippling my whole PC. Having to restart Flare more and more....IT informed my they have isntalled latest .NET build, v4 I believe. Though this doesnt seem to have changed anything.

Even if I leave the project open, but close all the topics etc, the RAM usage never really drops. Just increases the whole time......hope this is addressed in the next release.