MadCap Software Forums

Hi all,
I am unable to edit at a normal pace with Flare 8 because of its slowness. For example, I am currently editing a file of just under 10 KB. It often takes a few seconds to make a simple change, such as replacing a punctuation mark or selecting a word before replacing it.
This happens whether I have "show changes" on or off. Sometimes the UI goes black while executing the change, and sometimes it stays stuck on the old display. Sometimes the cursor jumps to the beginning of the file after making the change, and I have to find my place again.
We have a large project of couple hundreds topics and use SVN for Source Control.
Anyone can help with this?
Thank you,
Pascal

I've encountered slowness and black UI when doing a lot of edits on several topics (source controlled with Team Foundation Server). I suspect a memory leak of some sort, but haven't been able to reliably reproduce. Closing and re-opening Flare normally fixes the issues for me.

I also seem to remember someone suggesting turning off Enable GDI+ Text Renderer (File > Options > XML Editor), although some people said that also made the UI ugly and unreadable. Might be worth try to see if it helps your issue, though.

Sorry I don't have a definitive answer,
Amber

Thanks Amber, will try what you suggest... anyone has other ideas?

I have had good perfomance on a project of about 500 topics, 84K words. I am using a Laptop with Core i7 (4 cores) 2.67Ghz and 8GB memory.

perfomance has been pretty good. For example, the nasty index clean up (5009 used index keywords) was quite snappy yesterday. I also use SVN, running on a VM.

However, Flare is not a brilliant user of system resources - I previously ran Flare 7 on a desktop workstation with 8 cores and 24GB of mem. Even then, it would often stutter and stop responding while it was thinking.

On the other hand, Flare is no worse than many writing and media tools that are both graphics-intensive and do a lot of calculations under the hood. I have noticed that using a high-end graphics card can boost Flare performance. Probably by offloading the screen management to the GPU.

If you are using a laptop, take a look to see if you are using a power management plan that causes reduced performance (to save the battery). If so, reset it to performance mode, and use your power brick. Power management can cause the PC to "park" some of its cores to save power and reduce heat.

Today is the start of the review comment entry and I have hundreds of comments. I just switched on tracked changes and will report back on how it does. I have never tracked changes before because Flare's inability to generate reports including the change content or build output including unaccepted changes makes it a relatively useless feature. However, It is handy where I have multiple reviewers chewing on the same content and I want to collate input before committing changes.

Cheers,

pviscogl wrote:Hi all,
I am unable to edit at a normal pace with Flare 8 because of its slowness. For example, I am currently editing a file of just under 10 KB. It often takes a few seconds to make a simple change, such as replacing a punctuation mark or selecting a word before replacing it.
This happens whether I have "show changes" on or off. Sometimes the UI goes black while executing the change, and sometimes it stays stuck on the old display. Sometimes the cursor jumps to the beginning of the file after making the change, and I have to find my place again.
We have a large project of couple hundreds topics and use SVN for Source Control.
Anyone can help with this?
Thank you,
Pascal

Make a copy of the topic.
Open the copy and accept or decline all the track changes removing them from the topic code.
Does it then get easier to edit the topic? If so, please report this as a bug here:
https://www.madcapsoftware.com/feedback/bugs.aspx
You will want to attach the topic with all the track changes to the request that's located on the bottom of the form.

I did notice a slighty odd slowdown with track changes where there were multiple changes on a single para. The second and subsequent changes would not "take" for a few seconds. The topics were already checked out, so it was not a repo issue.