Flare performance and RAM?

[Lisah]

A group of us in corporate environment are having huge issues with slow screen redraws, launching Flare, display crumbling (chunks go missing), fonts change in style sheets, Flare can't keep up with typing (to the point we use other word processers), scrolling very jerky, Flare crashes frequently (2-4 times every HOUR), etc.

Suggestion made is that Flare requires 8 Gb of RAM. Most of us don't have more than 2 Gb of RAM. Corporate is going to make us sing and dance and prove our business case to get machines with more RAM installed.

So the question is ---> what's your experience? Is this list of problems likely due to not enough RAM? Are the listed problems a non-issue with more RAM? Has anyone started with small amounts of RAM and upgraded and seen vast improvements in Flare's performance?

We're also going through an upgrade to Windows 7 so we're trying to present IT with a request that won't leave us short-changed after upgrading.

TIA!

[LTinker68]

Are you upgrading to Windows 7 or are you getting new computers that have Windows 7? Because Windows 7 itself needs at least 1 GB RAM for a 32-bit system and 2 MB RAM for a 64-bit system. So if you upgrade to Windows 7 -- assuming your PC will support that -- then you're already about maxed out on your RAM. However, RAM is cheap, so corporate really shouldn't balk at getting you at least 16GB more RAM (again, assuming your PC supports that). Preferably more RAM, but that would depend on what your PC can support.

[Lisah]

We're mostly being upgraded to Win 7. Computers generally don't get replaced, they just get recycled through the company until they totally fall apart.

[sfoley]

So the question is ---> what's your experience? Is this list of problems likely due to not enough RAM? Are the listed problems a non-issue with more RAM? Has anyone started with small amounts of RAM and upgraded and seen vast improvements in Flare's performance?

The problem isn't often Flare itself, it's that there simply isn't anything left after you start Windows and then run all the standard corporate applications -- antivirus, firewall, email client, and web browser, plus applications to view reference documents.

One thing you can do, though, is disable GDI+ rendering. It's a truly massive difference in speed and responsiveness, to the point that I'm not sure why it's enabled by default. (I've only ever left GDI+ enabled on a Core i7 with 12GB of RAM, if that says anything.) To disable: Tools > Options, then on the XML Editor tab, clear the Enable GDI+ Text Renderer check box.

You should also get your IT department to bump you up to 4GB of RAM, per machine, if you are upgrading to Windows 7. It's rare that any computer built or purchased in the last eight years would not support that much.

[RamonS]

It all depends on the IT admin's willingness to go out and buy RAM at street prices. 4 GB of RAM cost around 30 bucks...unless you buy it straight from Dell, then it costs 200$. It is even worse with servers. We were looking at a RAM upgrade for a server and it turns out that buying a brand new server that has more RAM is cheaper.

If all else fails, spend the 30 bucks yourself and stay late one day to pop it into the box. It's not rocket science. I've done that, because that helped me more than fighting the red tape. It's sad that developers get the burly workstations and everyone else gets these entry level systems from the bargain bin.

[Lisah]

One thing you can do, though, is disable GDI+ rendering. It's a truly massive difference in speed and responsiveness, to the point that I'm not sure why it's enabled by default. (I've only ever left GDI+ enabled on a Core i7 with 12GB of RAM, if that says anything.) To disable: Tools > Options, then on the XML Editor tab, clear the Enable GDI+ Text Renderer check box.

Ugh, I tried this. Maybe it's that my machine has a crappy graphics renderer, but, ick. Very very very pixelated text on my monitor. Rats, on so many levels. It sounded like a great idea.

btw in Flare 8, there is no Tools>Options menu. Options are under the File menu, a tiny button at the bottom of that pop up.

[Lisah]

It all depends on the IT admin's willingness to go out and buy RAM at street prices.

<sigh> Ain't that the truth. My guess is they fork out the mega bucks. Why else would we have to request a new computer; rather than upgrade the RAM they order a machine with the configuration. I expect if I broke open the laptop as you suggest, demons would descend and carry off my cats.

Thanks for all the advice.

[RamonS]

Missed the laptop part.....laptop? Do you travel a lot? Laptops are notorious underperformer unless you get one of these mobile workstations.

[Lisah]

Missed the laptop part.....laptop? Do you travel a lot? Laptops are notorious underperformer unless you get one of these mobile workstations.

I hadn't mentioned it, that's why it's new info here. No, laptops are what we get. Standard issue. I don't know of anyone who gets a box anymore. Maybe the UX designers or marketing graphics people. Even developers use laptops.

[crdmerge2]

We also are assigned laptops in this contract job, using Flare: Installed Memory (RAM): 4.00 GB (3.49 GB usable)

We're also experiencing awful refresh rates for minor things like adding or renaming bookmarks, losing content or duplicating content when adding content near the bottom of page layouts, etc. You really need to try to convince them that Flare has become as much of a resource hog as many UX design or graphics tools.


Good luck,
Leon

[MattG]

My Flare 7 won't ever use more than 1GB of memory, whatever I've doing. Does anyone know of a hack to get it to use more?

(I'm lucky in that my PC has 8GB. My IT department is competent enough to can compare the value of my time to the value of RAM.)

I also notice Flare slowing down when working with large topics and, yes, turning off GDI+ helps. I also frequently run out of memory when I create large (1000 page) PDFs. There is an argument that I shouldn't be creating such PDFs, of course...

Matt

[sfoley]

Ugh, I tried this. Maybe it's that my machine has a crappy graphics renderer, but, ick. Very very very pixelated text on my monitor. Rats, on so many levels. It sounded like a great idea.

GDI+ makes heavy use of subpixel rendering to show text at its proper font weight. It does look better, but it uses software rendering (meaning your CPU and system memory do the heavy lifting) so it has pretty terrible performance on slower machines. I didn't think that was worth mentioning, since it sounds like you're unable to get work done efficiently while GDI+ is enabled, but of course that's up to you.

A few other things you can disable that can improve performance:
- In Options, everything in the Analyzer and Auto Suggestion tabs, and the "Auto-complete Index and Concept entries" setting in the Index & Concepts tab
- Instant Messaging, using Active Directory (see "Disabling Instant Messaging" in Flare Help)

btw in Flare 8, there is no Tools>Options menu. Options are under the File menu, a tiny button at the bottom of that pop up.

Also correct, for the ribbon interface. The menu interface works as described, and I was too lazy to type up both methods.

[Steve Davies]

I've had Flare 8.1.2 installed (trial) for about six weeks and it now runs like a three-legged dog. The other authoring programmes I use (Help & Manual and Adobe TCS 4.0) are not exhibiting similar slow downs, so I have to assume that the issue is with Flare.

I have a "fast" laptop:

Dell Latitude XT3
W7 Ultimate 64bit
Intl Core i7-2640M 2.8GHz
5.88 GB usable RAM

I don't have any graphical glitches, but I do have serious pauses, freezes and am experiencing frequent crashes. For example, it takes about a minute to delete a topic in my project, about three minutes to update the Pending Check-Ins list, and about the same time to abort a solution control commit (when done directly through SVN, this takes about 15 seconds). The project itself consists of only a ToC, Glossary, Index and about five topic pages. So, it's hardly massive.

If there's no fix to this, I don't think that Flare could possibly be considered as a serious contender for our new authoring tool.

[Lisah]

Thanks for contributing your experience. This definitely lends credence to the Flare tech guy's assertion that 8 Gb RAM is needed.

[Steve Davies]

You are welcome, Lisa.

My performance issues with Flare extend to even the most simple of operations: when I click Flare from the Windows Start Menu, I have to wait about 10 seconds before the Flare loading screen appears. When I click to open a project, it takes a good number of seconds to actually execute the operation. When I highlight text in the XML editor, there is a lag between moving my mouse and the text being highlighted.

These are all pretty basic things, and I am not convinced that they are all down to RAM.

[Lisah]

I agree. The length of time to launch Flare has been raised by others previously; your experience mirrors mine for length and I only have 2.8 Gb of RAM.

Typing too fast for Flare to keep up is one of my pet peeves. I end up using Word to create new topics, which is hardly useful. And I am nowhere near the world's fastest typist. Just average.

[joy]

I have 8 GB of RAM on Windows 7 and I also experience lag issues with Flare.

For me, it seems to happen mostly after Flare has been running for a day or so. It doesn't matter whether the project is large or small. I wonder if it's a memory leak because most of the time the lag sorts itself out after I quit and restart. That seems to "release" my mouse and keyboard -- it's like they've been running under water.

I know that doesn't help those of you who experience this all the time but I wanted to chime in and say that it still happens, even with a lot of RAM.

[Isleofgough]

I have lots of memory issues with Flare on a MacBook Pro with SSD drive and 8GB RAM. This appears to be unique to Flare, as it does not occur with basically the same files in Framemaker, mif2go, or robohelp. Graphic files which are around 1MB can cause this. I am hoping this will be addressed in updates.

[Lisah]

Hi Isleofgough,

Do you have problems if the total size of all images in the topic or project is 1 MB or more, or only if a single one of the images in a topic is 1 MB?

thanks, Lisa

[Isleofgough]

Over 1 MB per image seems to cause problems (png, svg, jpg). This occurs even with few images per document.

[CATERAF]

Thanks very much for all these reponses! It sounds like there are others experiencing similar issues to me. However, I already have 8GB of RAM and I'm having big problems with some of my topics. It's crashing continually, to even hit the enter ('return') takes at least 10-20 seconds to produce a new paragraph, etc.
Granted, i have a few huge topics (consists of about 18 snippets, each with lots of images) and I thought it was my fault for breaking Flare by having too large a topic.
However, if I am to get more RAM, would that sort this problem out?

Ideally, I would break my topic into smaller topics, but that would require restructuring the whole manual into a less user-friendly manual and unfortunately I don't fancy doing that due to deadlines, requirements etc. If I had known the topic would get this large to start with I probably wouldn't have structured it the way it is. Hindsight

So, all that in mind, is it unusual to be needing more than 8GB of RAM? I'm sure I can get it through the IT department, it's more just whether this is something I should be required to be asking for.
We are doing maintenance manuals which are very photo-heavy and I think that's probably the reason Flare is so slow and crashes so often (every few minutes if I'm working on one of our biggest topics).

Thanks for the advice!
Avril