MadCap Software Forums

I have Flare 7.2 on Windows 7 Pro.

Are there, perhaps, practices that I should be aware of (and maybe avoid) that slow down Flare?

My projects are not huge.

When I click a folder in Content Explorer, to move from one folder list to another (with at most a few hundred files in either folder), Flare can take half a minute, sometimes, to stop showing the file list in the first folder and start showing the file list in the clicked folder. It's usually longer after I've done a Save All (which I do every few minutes, being paranoid and all...), but not usually within seconds of the Save, so the file system has definitely had time to settle down.

This is on my local computer only, one partition of one hard drive. No component of any of my projects lives on a network drive.

The computer is a year-old laptop HP EliteBook 8540 with i5 and 4 gigs of memory. I have a little rev-meter on my desktop, and it doesn't show the cpu straining. The 320GB hard drive is less than half full. The corporate weekly virus-scan is not running. Declared "Virtual Memory" is more than adequate.

-kevin

You can switch a few functions on an off - maybe you should have a look at Tools | Options?

First question would be, do you have similar issues in Windows (file) Explorer? If you have things like file preview on, it can slow things down. (Windows is actually dumb enough that if you select a file and have Windows preview it, it won't let you delete that file because it's in use... by the previewer ) If so, turn off some of those Windows features.

Also, are you using source control? If you are, try a test project that isn't bound to source control and see if that makes a difference.

When editing topics, the Flare settings for viewing with Cleartype font smoothing and with the GDI text renderer can cause slow downs. I haven't seen them affect the file viewer, but they might. These settings are in View > Show. I usually turn both off because they bog Flare down and have minimal benefit (fonts look nicer while editing, that's about it--your final output isn't affected one way or the other).

HTH.

No similar problem in Windows.

Not using Flare with source control.

We do have source control, but it's not used that way.
I just check in a copy of my project directory occasionally, as a form of backup.
I never check anything out of MKS, and Flare doesn't know it exists.


Yes, I've met many of the Windoze stupidities. Like being unable to delete a directory on a server because it's not empty... and it's not empty because some copy of Windoze somewhere keeps generating a thumbs (thumbnail summary) file for that directory.

But in this case, as I say, it's all Win 7 and all on my own hard drive. If Flare didn't insist on being able to talk to the mothership, I'd pull the network plug and see if that helped.

Kevin:

I've noticed one thing for sure in Flare 7.2.

I have a small three-pages sub-project that uses six bordlerless tables to place bulleted or numbered lists to the right side of a corresponding graphic. (I fell back to using a positioning table because although CSS could position the two elements side-by-side, I couldn't make the lists behave properly.)

If I generate that three-pages layout as a PDF, the generation process takes quite a while to complete. Gen'ing the same pages as WebHelp doesn't take anywhere near as long.

I don't know why, exactly, this is the case, but my supposition is that translating the XHTML positioning of the side-by-elements to PDF pages is processing intensive. Fortunately, I don't have to use this particular layout strategy very often.

Cheers & hope this helps,
Riley
SFO

Sometimes heavy use of conditions can cause a bit of slowness.
Turning off the conditional indicators can improve the speed of being able to move around in the framework.
These indicators can be turned off in Content Explorer by clicking on the Hide/Show conditional Indicator button at the top of the window.
The same can be true for larger topics with lots of conditions. The button is located at the bottom of the editor.