Memory Issues since moving to Flare 10

[Dkadilak62263]

We have several folks on our team that continue to have performance issues while working in Flare 10 projects. Some projects are large, some small, some bound to TFS, some not, so there is nothing consistent to point a finger at except for RAM. Folks with 8GB are having the issues; those of us with 16GB are not.
The issues are:
- Flare hangs when they open Content Explorer - they often have to force the app to close using task manager.
- Program hangs or kicks up a black screen when they work in the project - type too fast
- Often while working in a project, Flare goes into “Not responding” mode and they sometimes can wait it out and other times have to use task manager to kill the application.
I’m guessing this has to be a memory leak in the application? I don’t think 8GB of RAM is an unreasonable number. Also, these issues did not exist in Flare 9.
We've brought this up with support a couple of times, and they say they cannot duplicate the problem. I'm thinking we cannot be alone with this issue?

[ToddPh]

I would be surprised if the 8GB of RAM is the problem, because my laptop here at work is loaded with 8GB and I have no issues (currently) with Flare 10.2. I would expect all of your writer's to experience the same issues if it were a memory leak, just that the ones with 16GB would take longer to see the issues. Do the problems happen immediately when they open Flare? Or do they develop over time?

Are they running the latest versions of .NET?

Are your project working folder local or remote on a network?

[ChoccieMuffin]

I get the black screen thing too. It happens more at the moment because I'm doing lots of tidying up jobs, like deleting obsolete files (using Analyzer to find them), and it happens more on larger projects than smaller ones. It gets worse over time, so I close everything and restart my machine, which seems to make it a bit better.

[techwriterkai]

In our team of 10 writers, we also see the occasional hang or black screen. Based on our anecdotal, non-scientific evidence, hard-drive speed seems to be equally relevant. Note that for Flare 10, the Sys Reqs at http://kb.madcapsoftware.com/#Flare/Ins ... ements.htm say: "We recommend a hard drive speed of 7200 rpm or above for optimum performance." A solid-state disk is also nice. Hope this helps.

[ToddPh]

I get the black screen thing too. It happens more at the moment because I'm doing lots of tidying up jobs, like deleting obsolete files (using Analyzer to find them), and it happens more on larger projects than smaller ones. It gets worse over time, so I close everything and restart my machine, which seems to make it a bit better.

Now THAT does make it sound like a memory leak. Personally, I'd be betting that it's in .NET rather than Flare, but that's got to be annoying. Now that I think about it, both of the laptops where I run Flare have SSDs as their system drives (also where Flare is installed). Kai might have a point on disk speed affecting this issue.

[ctremblay]

I'm seeing the black screen issue in Flare 2017. All of the same symptoms as mentioned in these posts. I've submitted a bug report for this. My machine has 16GB RAM but does not have an SSD. I'm running the latest .NET. My projects are small to medium sized, and I'm running my project locally. The problem does get worse over time. I think it's most notable when Flare is "doing a lot of work". So, it seems that the key factor is that I need an SSD/7200 RPM... I think MadCap needs to just say SSD/7200 RPM is a minimum requirement. Because it is not listed as a minimum requirement, my management was not willing to spend the money to purchase an SSD.