Painfully slow rendering of the Preview window

[Rona Kwestel]

Has anyone found a solution to the unbearably slow rendering of the Preview window? It can take up to 40 seconds for a topic to display in the Preview window, which is about 39 seconds too long. And I know I'm not alone based on this comment: viewtopic.php?f=9&t=18118&p=96914&hilit ... iew#p96914

I had opened a support ticket with MadCap on this a few months ago, but none of the steps they suggested trying - repairing all instances of the Microsoft .NET Framework, deleting the Analyzer and Output folders, the CatapultMdiEditor folder, ... - seemed to make any difference.

It seems like it's related to project size/complexity, as a small, newly created project in Flare doesn't exhibit the problem. In fact, if I copy one folder's worth of topics - about 10 files - from my current project to a newly created project, and just copy over my stylesheet so it can pick up the correct styles, all of those topics render in less than 1 second, and just show "errors' where there are things like undefined variables.

One thing I notice is that the "Conditional Expression" field is empty in this new project because I've defined no conditions. That seems like it may well be the culprit. In my regular project, the Conditional Expression field contains the following:

Code: Select all

Audience.Public or Default.ScreenOnly or DocType.KB or not ( Audience.Gated or Audience.Internal or Audience.Writers or "Default.Not Ready for Publish" or Default.PrintOnly or DocType.Help or DocType.SILQ )

Of course, one of the big selling points of Flare is the conditional content, so it would be rather unfortunate if that is, indeed, the cause.

[roboHAL]

yeah I've noticed that occasionally the preview can take a while to render. There doesn't appear to be any rhyme-or-reason but what I do which often works is immediately close the window if the display is not rendered in a second or so and then click to preview once more. Granted one shouldn't have to do that but it can beat the alternative or impatiently waiting. A similar occurrence can happen when generating reports. Most of the time they generate quickly but on occasion Flare displays a message that it is rebuilding the database and one can wait forever.

[Rona Kwestel]

Thanks, robo. Based on your input, I'm observing a slightly different behavior. I can't "Cancel" any faster than the rendering would take, as whatever is slowing up the process is also causing it to not receive the Cancel request, but once it's closed, previewing other topics seems to go much quicker, at least for a short while. Then, if you wait for some time and/or try rendering a more complicated topic with dropdowns, it's slow again.

In related news, has anyone noticed that once you have the topic in preview, if you click through to another topic, other bugs reveal themselves? For example, cross reference links are not live and rendered as plain text, and variables are not resolved, making it look like you're missing text.

There's definitely work to be done to improve the preview feature.

[Rona Kwestel]

I was on the phone yesterday with MadCap support about a different issue, and brought up the slow preview issue again, and he found the solution in an old support call log. As it turns out, there was a thread in the forum with the solution, but somehow I missed it.

It's the Google Analytics code in our master page that's causing the problem, and commenting out that code while working on new content is the workaround. If other people come across this, please report it to MadCap to raise the priority of the ticket. It seems like it should be possible to detect that code and ignore it when in preview mode.

[Rona Kwestel]

It suddenly occurred to me that it made sense to create a "devMasterPage" without the Google Analytics code so that I don't have to remember to uncomment out the Google Analytics code in the main master page before publishing to our public site. The dev target that we use for testing points to the devMasterPage (on the Advanced tab - scroll down past the checkboxes - not sure why that's not on the General tab), so when you preview using the dev target, it doesn't get slowed down by the Google Analytics, and there are no changes needed before publishing to the public site.

[smajors]

I'm having a similar yet different issue with the Preview window. When I try to Preview in the print medium, I get an error and I can't preview at all. When I select the web layout/medium, it previews fine. Does anyone know how to fix this or why it's happening? The print preview has worked before so not sure if it's a setting that changed or what.

I've tried selecting several different targets and still get this error.

preview_error.png

[RamonS]

A stab in the dark, but we out of a sudden encountered significant slow downs of all browsers. Turned out it was Kaspersky antivirus doing stuff that even IT could not figure out (IT did notice that Kaspersky sends hundreds of GB of data to servers in Canada each night, reason unknown). So....if possible pause AV and if that makes a difference have IT add an exception for Flare.
Another stab in the dark, I also encounter rendering issues in browsers when there are left over processes of the same browser (such as IE crashed, which it does often). Clearing those out might help as well.

Just guessing here, but maybe it helps.