MadCap Software Forums

All,
Batch builds run overnight on a dedicated server-VM with its own Flare license - this serves six writers at this office, and more to come.

Some of us also need to build and publish individual projects during the day, to verify fixes, prepare for meetings, etc., so we run the build from our individual instances of Flare.
For me, that takes more than 2 hours for one product (down from 3), and I can't do other work in Flare during that time.

I wonder how long a Build-and-Publish cycle takes you. Anybody? Rough figures?

BTW, this was 18-to-20 minutes before we enabled substring searching in our docs, then it got ten times longer - probably due to the indexing. But we can't go back now - everybody loves substring search.

Thanks.

Takes about 15 minutes for my main project and about 2 minutes for my other project, but build times will vary drastically based on size and complexity of the project.
I wouldn't build on a VM unless you happen to have a really high performing host server with fast storage. VMs tend to have quite high disk I/O. I assume the ad hoc builds are more an issue than the nightly batch builds.

Do you have sub-string search enabled for HTML output?

As I mentioned, that bumped my build times from 18-20 minutes up to nearly 3 hours for the same material.

I did some optimizing of content, so that the search index wasn't trying to index so many super-long strings (dozens or hundreds of characters each, with no spaces) but that only brought the build time down to around 2 hours... for what formerly took 20 minutes.

Regarding your observations about use of VMs:
We have VMs on the same server as the project-file server, as well as on a separate server, and I don't notice much difference, so network latency doesn't seem to be a problem. Also, when I used to work from a Flare instance on my laptop - same office building as that server, but a different subnet, all Flare performance was slightly slower than when I was simply Remote-Desktop-ing to my VM. Everything is a bit rougher when I work from home over VPN to that VM, but is simply impossible if I try to work from the laptop Flare instance to my source on the server. So the Flare on my company laptop has gathered dust and I just use RDP to work on that VM no matter where I'm physically located.

For example, right now I'm walking at 2.4mph on my treadmill desk, at home.

So, anyway, let me know about the substring search capability - is it enabled for your projects?

We keep our projects on a server, which has definitely been useful though it slows things down. 600 topic, figure heavy, 600MB project builds in about 50 minutes. We publish with Filezilla, which takes about 15 minutes.

Well, for ongoing work, I can actually recommend working via VMs, IFF your VMs are on the same server, or perhaps sharing a rack on the same subnet.
Among other advantages, it makes it possible to work from home or from distant offices without needing to carry a copy of your Flare project source with you.

But how about my other question? Do you have the substring search activated?

Can your webbish/html users search for a three- or -four-letter string embedded in words and file paths and function names and the like?

It was long a sore point that our users could not find stuff that they needed, and everybody said hallelujah when Flare began supporting substring search in-earnest. We can't go back.

I'm very curious how it affects other Flare using shops, and whether I'm blaming that feature for something that might have other causes.

Also, is FileZilla better/faster than Flare's own Publish (which is just a copy operation, as far as I know)? Or do you use it for unrelated reasons (like FTP capability)?

I don't have that search option enabled. I can try it out later assuming if I do not forget about it.

I tried it with my small project and build/publish changed from 2 minutes to over 3 minutes with that option on. I definitely saw that those topics that contain a lot of text take significantly longer to get processed. Not that much of a surprise, there is more stuff that needs to be done.

Thanks.

I think it's time for a separate, specific question/post.