Starting Flare - Slow

[Techno]

Sorry if this has come up before and I've missed it in my forum search.

I find that Flare, right up to and including V8 very slow to start. I've a desktop with Windows 7 Professional and 3 MB ram, and a laptop with W7 Ultimate and 4 MB of ram, and it's the same on both. When I say slow, I mean to the point of often wondering if I have in fact clicked on the Flare icon, so I sometimes click again, and minutes later, I'm runninjg 2 copies.

I hasten to add that this is simply running Flare, not running it via a previously used project icon.

Hopefully this is just me being a dummy and I've not set somethng glaringly obvious.

George.

[SteveS]

Hi George,

I hope thats GBs of RAM, not MBs

Does this happen all the time, or do you just open Flare first thing after the computers have started?

[Techno]

Oops sorry, yes! That is in fact GBs of RAM.

And yes, it is slow on both laptop and desktop. It's something like 20 - 25 seconds before I see the round Flare icon appear.

George.

[RamonS]

Which speed do your drives have? Typically, laptop drives are running at 5.4 k rpm and tend to have low amounts of cache. When starting up Flare loads a lot of files from disk. What else are you running when starting Flare? Also, how much memory is left when starting Flare? From my experience, W7 in a typical configuration uses 1.5 to 2 GB depending on which drivers and services are started (especially MSSQL Server, which eats RAM like there is no tomorrow). Since Windows does not max out physical RAM first before swapping to disk you may encounter this already when starting Flare. Some memory from idling apps may be pushed to swap space to have Flare as active app use the memory instead. In short, for a production box running W7 64 bit having only 4 GB RAM is rather tight. Fast drives that are well maintained also have a big impact. I don't know how much influence you have over the hardware you can use, but if this is a major concern exchange the drive for a 10k rpm drive with 64 MB cache. A bit pricey, but worth it. Or you could use an SSD, but from what I read it is a hit or miss depending on SATA controller, SSD controller, BIOS support, and OS configuration. Or are these 32 bit systems? in that case the 4GB are only 3.2 GB as 32 bit OS cannot address more without trickery.
My recommendation would be to spend the 30 bucks for a RAM expansion. Even if it does not entirely fix the problem it will surely help overall.

[LTinker68]

I've seen something similar that's gotten especially worse with v8. Part of that is definitely with Flare -- others have seen v8 load slowly.

However, a lot of the problem I've tracked to the anti-virus software we use at the company. I don't know if it's the way it's configured or if it's an out-of-the-box feature, but it can slow down loading of applications, not just Flare. Even launching Outlook can be extremely slow. It's gotten to the point where I'll open the Task Manager and sort the list of running services to see what's using the CPU, and a couple pieces of the anti-virus app are eating up a lot of my CPU. I have to wait until it goes back into manageable levels before I see my app load.

Not saying that's definitively the case in your situation, but it's something to look at.

[Techno]

This may be off topic, but since speed concerns with Flare started it, I may as well finish by explaining the outcome.

I took veryone's advice, inlcuding Flare Tech. Support, and bought 8 GB of RAM.

Fitted it, restarted, could get to BIOS, but no further. (Old RAM back in, and still worked)

Found setting in BIOS to prevent use of RAM by Video system.

This time Windows began for a second, flashed a blue screen, and back to re-boot.

Took a flyer and replaced the Nvidea digital Monitor PCI Express card (which had been working fine) with an ASUS EAH6450.

All now works perfectly. (Nvidea card is now in another system and appears to be working fine)

And of course, if this had happened 24 hours later, Flare 8.1 would have resolved my issue anyway

[RamonS]

But now you got a nice beefy system out of it.

[Techno]

Yes - a couple of hundred bucks lighter.

It does however show up some editing issues, but will check out longer before I bug them.

[feitelberg]

I'm finding that Flare 9 takes much longer (say about a minute) to start over Flare 8.1. Why would that be?

[nistech]

On my PC, Flare 9 starts much longer than 8.1, too. It Needs more than a Minute - on every start (cold and warm). I think, that ist a bug.
(Windows 8 Enterprise, i7 975 CPU, 8 GB Memory)

[SteveS]

Hi Nistech, welcome to the forums.

I tested this on my notebook (Win 8, 4 GB RAM) and it took just over a minute from when the start screen first appeared. I then noticed that although Win 8 boots to the start screen very quickly it takes an age to load all the other stuff. Could be Flare has to compete for system resources if you try to open it while Windows is still booting.

Once Windows is running it takes 10 seconds from the desktop or start screen to open Flare.

One thing I suspect will slow things down is if you have the Auto Reload Documents option set to yes, so Flare reloads the files you had opene when you closed it down. If there are a lot of files, particularly over a network share, the start process will be slower. This could be very noticable on the initial boot, depending on how slow your machine is in reconnecting to a network.

HTH

[LTinker68]

I don't think it's related to when Windows is booting. I've noticed that the first time I start Flare after I've logged in it takes a minute or so, regardless if I just logged in or if I logged in 4 hours ago. If I shut down Flare then restart it later, it loads faster, so long as I haven't logged off Windows in the interim. That's on Win 7 64-bit, 3.10GHz, 6.0 GB RAM.

I haven't tested switching users as opposed to expressly logging out to see if that's different.

So I don't think it's related to Windows actively booting so much as starting processes that Flare needs to run. Logging off and/or rebooting stops the processes, so the next time you start Flare, it has to start those processes again.

Of course, that's all theory. I haven't actually made a list of all the processes that are running before or after starting Flare. And if that theory is correct, then I don't know if the issue is with Flare, .NET, or Windows, or combination thereof.

[SteveS]

I just tried a cold start of the laptop. Let the thing chug away for 5 minutes (while I made a coffee) then started Flare.

Took just under 20 seconds. I'm not reloading the project and my project files are on the local hard drive.

So, from that I think the problem is likely to be:
1. System resources being used for other processes (particularly just after Windows starts).
2. Loading the last used project and opening the topics.
3. Network issues.

The network issue could well be the culprit. With Flare phoning home there could be a delay while the PC establishes an Internet connection.

I also wonder about some of the resource hungry features from within Flare, if they are enabled it could also have an impact.

[gbusch]

Sorry for bumping this old topic.
Just wanted to give some feedback to this problem.
I recently had the same problem with Flare 9 beeing slow on startup or loading a project.
I did some investigations in the forums and somewhere it was mentioned to remove the folder "/users/[your username]/AppData/Roaming/Madcapsoftware/Flare/CatapulMdiEditor". However this didn't help for me. So i checked out all AppData folders of all users and removed everything related to MadCap. (I did a backup of those folders first but imho those are temporary folders created by the software itself on runtime. If they are mandatory the program can recreate them by itself as it did the first time. And if not, i can restore them from my backup.)

C:\Users\All Users\MadCap Software\Capture
C:\Users\All Users\MadCap Software\Flare
C:\Users\All Users\MadCap Software\Lingo

C:\Users\[your username]\AppData\Roaming\MadCap Software\Align
C:\Users\[your username]\AppData\Roaming\MadCap Software\Capture
C:\Users\[your username]\AppData\Roaming\MadCap Software\Dictionaries
C:\Users\[your username]\AppData\Roaming\MadCap Software\Flare
C:\Users\[your username]\AppData\Roaming\MadCap Software\Lingo

C:\Users\[your username]\AppData\Local\MadCap Software\CachedHelpSystems
C:\Users\[your username]\AppData\Local\MadCap Software\HelpViever

No sure if this is good idea (generally it always sounds like a very bad idea to delete things you don't know what it is) but when i restarted Flare it looks like i was starting it the very first time (asking for the license key - wich was already autofilled in the form - had to recreate my window panes again etc.).
However nothing bad happens but Flare started amazingly fast since then.

Maybe this makes any sense to anyone who is more involved in Flare...

EDIT:
is it possible that the recently opened project/files list can also be a performance killer?
I noticed there where lots of test projects/topics that did not exist anymore on my hard drive.
Since i cleaned up this list after i did the "delete folder" thing i cannot say if this also would have solved my issue.