100% CPU every word I type

[merrill77]

I'm a new user - we recently migrated from RoboHelp and this is the first time I've done anything beyond generating the output.

Every word I type causes the CPU to go to 100% for a few seconds. If I type 5 words, it's more like 15 seconds. As you can imagine, this makes Flare nearly unusable. I've tried some suggestions I found on other posts on this forum, but none have helped (I disabled collecting phrases and a number of options under View > Show).

I'm running on XP/SP2, 400M RAM (using 200M with Flare running). My project is smallish (<200 pages). I have .NET 2.0 and 3.0 installed (at least one of which was installed by/for Flare, I think?).

Any suggestions?

TIA!
Chris

[Andrew]

400 MB of RAM is *tiny* for Flare (it's also a very odd number -- are you using a virtual machine, like Virtual PC 2007 or VMware?). It will run, but it will be slow. I don't know that that is what the problem you are having is, however; that sounds more like a processing power limitation. What CPU are you using?

I assume, among the View > Show options you turned off, you turned off both ClearType font smoothing, and GDI Text Renderer? Those can take up some performance in the XML Editor. I've also noticed that slow disk i/o makes typing in Flare very slow (for example, if you are accessing your Flare project across a slow / high latency network).

[KevinDAmery]

400 MB of RAM is *tiny* for Flare (it's also a very odd number -- are you using a virtual machine, like Virtual PC 2007 or VMware?).

Heck, for that matter 400MB is small for XP. And yes, it is a very odd number for RAM (RAM typically ships in increments of 256 MB, 512 MB, or 1024 MB aka 1 GB).

Also, what type of processor does your system have? If it's a virtual machine as Andrew asked, how heavily used is the server its hosted on?

Madcap recommends a Pentium 4 with 512 MB of ram for a Flare system, but personally I think that's a bit low: I would go for at least 1 GB, 2 if you can swing it (I have 4 GB here because I need to run our application plus Flare plus Office plus a browser etc. all at the same time).

[Madcap Guru]

What version of Flare are you using?

[merrill77]

Yes, I'm running in a VM - VMware server on a dual 2.8GHz Xeon (the guest OS has a single CPU). The host machine typically runs about 10% CPU utilization. I considered upping the memory on the VM, but the guest OS isn't even using all of the 400M. The project isn't very big - memory usage goes from 130M before opening the project to 190M after opening the project and performing the scan. Opening the project and performing the scan goes pretty quick - I haven't measured it but I'd guess 30 seconds or less. This seems to be a CPU-usage problem, not disk. The project is stored locally. Also I have no other apps running when using Flare.

Note that this is only a problem when typing new text into a page editor. Other operations in the app are snappy - navigating, opening new editors, cursoring around in the editor, even the build isn't terribly slow. Just typing new text.

FWIW, RoboHelp ran beautifully on the same VM. I expected Flare to be slower...just not this slow.

I assume, among the View > Show options you turned off, you turned off both ClearType font smoothing, and GDI Text Renderer?

Yup, those are both off.


Any other advice?
TIA!
Chris

[KevinDAmery]

Just for comparison purposes, I would install Flare on a "real" system rather than a virtual one and try the same operation. If it works on a real system but is bad in VM, it could be either there's something about the specific VM environment you're using that Flare doesn't like or that Flare doesn't like operating in a virtual environment in general.

By way of comparison, I'm using a system with a similar CPU to what you describe here without any trouble - the primary difference is that I run it locally rather than through a VM.

[merrill77]

Ok, I tried it on my own machine, which is XP, fully up to date, 2.4GHz Core2 Duo laptop with 2G RAM. It exhibits nearly the same behavior. Every word I type spikes the CPU for a few seconds. A full sentence does it for 15 seconds. The result is not as devastating, since it is a dual-core machine only one CPU gets tied up and the GUI remains responsive. The duration of the CPU spike is approximately the same.

So this seems to be specific to my project, rather than the OS, hardware or virtualiztion. AFAICR, a dual-core was not required for Flare

My project was imported from Robohelp. It is possible something is not right with the project setup?

Chris

[Andrew]

Flare does real-time transforms of text in its topics. It's possible that this slowdown is due to some transform it is performing. Does this occur in every topic, or just some? Does it occur in a new topic that you've created purely in Flare? Is it worse in large topics, or topics with a lot of tables, etc.?

[merrill77]

I've tried in several topics from large to small (large is maybe 10-20 pages of text, small is 1/3 page) and the result is the same. The simple topic has no tables or what I would consider to be complex formatting.

I've also tried a new topic created in Flare with the same result.

[Andrew]

Can you reproduce the same problem in the sample project?

[merrill77]

Can you reproduce the same problem in the sample project?

I cannot reproduce it in a new/empty project. While testing that, I noticed something I had not seen before - an "IntelliSense" pop-up hovering around where I typed. I had never seen this before and read the help to see what it was doing. It seemed like a processor-intensive operation, so I turned it off and returned to my regular project. Guess what?

IT IS FIXED!

Well, sorta. It is fixed as long as I don't use that feature. I'm not sure HOW processor intensive this feature is supposed to be, but it does not behave nicely for me at all. I still see high CPU (100%) when I'm typing, but it drops immediately when I stop typing and the GUI is still responsive (before, the words I typed did not appear for many seconds).

Thanks for your help!
Chris

[WebbJ]

an "IntelliSense" pop-up ... so I turned it off

Thanks for sharing the solution, merrill77!
Disabling IntelliSense fixed the same problem at once for me:

• Around 97% to 98% CPU usage for about 35 seconds from start of typing.
  Windows XP Home with SP3, Celeron 2.3GHz, 1GB RAM.

Now, since we may wish to use that feature sometime, does anyone know:

• Is this an inherent problem, or dependent on CPU performance, or a fixable flaw in the product?
  Is anyone using the IntelliSense tool without noticeable delays in editing?
  If so, on what kind & capacity of PC & OS?

Regards,
Seer

[RamonS]

While tech support is active in these forums it is not the best way to report any issues. You can do that here: https://www.madcapsoftware.com/bugs/submit.aspx

[Andrew]

I turned off that feature long ago because it was supremely annoying, but I don't remember there being any delay. I use a Core2Duo E6550 (2.33 GHz). Your CPU is slower, but not enormously so.

[WebbJ]

Thanks, Andrew
As Rick's question implied, perhaps Flare's version has something to do with this.
I've submitted a query to MadCap Tech Support - we'll see what happens...

[jivana]

Hi, I am experiencing a similar issue and turning off IntelliSense does not make a difference - have you heard anything from Support?
On my Vista computer, dual core 2.20GHz processor with 4GB of memory, Flare increases the CPU %age when I start it, but it is when I open the project I am working on that the load goes right up to 50-80%, with Flare using practically all of that, according to Task Manager.
The project has 1200 topics, which I would have thought is medium size, or could that be a problem? It is very light on images and fancy features.

[Andrew]

If you leave it alone for some minutes (maybe 20?) does the CPU usage go away? If so, that is Flare scanning your topics and updating your Analyzer index. This occurs every time you open Flare, and also at various other times (such as after making changes to a topic and saving). Flare used to show you the progress of the scan back in v4.2.1. However, since we just moved to 6.0, I've noticed the progress indicators and status messages are gone, so that CPU usage would be a mystery.

In my experience, Flare will automatically throttle that scanning if any other activity is going on. For example, if I open our software package, Flare's scanning cuts out while it opens and loads. Is the system very slow?

[jivana]

Thanks for your reply.
No, the CPU usage levels stays up as long as I have Flare open - it remains high even when I close the project.
The system is generally not slow at all, it is very responsive, that's really why I am wondering what's going on.
I may log a call with Support after all.

[jivana]

I thought I'd let people know what caused the issue for me:
MadCap Analyzer (the built-in version) kept getting stuck at a certain percentage, which turned out to be a particular topic that contained a large table with 830-ish rows.
I know what you're thinking, but it was a good solution in our legacy authoring tool, which was able to handle it.
Now I'll have to try to find out what Flare's limit is and split up the topic.

[LTinker68]

MadCap Analyzer (the built-in version) kept getting stuck at a certain percentage, which turned out to be a particular topic that contained a large table with 830-ish rows.

Make sure you report this at http://www.madcapsoftware.com/bugs/submit.aspx if you haven't already.

[jivana]

MadCap have confirmed this as a bug.