Known Participant

Question

Build time in Robohelp 8

Forum|Forum|17 years ago
March 23, 2009
14 replies
3827 views

Hi all,

I've been playing around with the trial version of RH8 before making the upgrade from version 7, and after importing my project the main thing I've noticed is that it takes a lot longer to generate my primary layout (webhelp), and it seems to be spending most of it's time building the search...

I can see that the search facility has been greatly modified and it looks better, but it does seem to take a long long time to generate builds in this version... roughly 30 mins where it was 5 mins or less in v7.

My project has around 700 pages, and have not yet assigned any of the new "search keywords" (just added one to test it out)... Windows XP SP2 (I know!! corporate managed environment!!), Core 2 Duo 1.8GHz, 1GB RAM, running from C drive, not in source control...

WebHelp

This topic has been closed for replies.

J

juerchr

Participant

Hi,

I actually found a partly solution for this. On the machines where the generation didn't work I excluded all embedded documents from the indexing functionality by modifying the respective XML file in the program directory.

Though that still doesn't explain why it is working on my laptop but on no other machine.

Thanks for the hints though, unfortunately they didn't fix that. Only the excluding of the office and PDF file formats resulted in a normal generation time.

Best Regards

Christian

Mark PudAuthor

Known Participant

Hi Peter,

Thanks for the offer!

I'll have to do some work to strip out the confidential processes etc so that I don't lose my job ;-)

So hopefully on Monday I will be able to send this over to you...

P

Pete_Rossborough

Participant

Did you ever get this issue resolved?

I have recently installed Robohelp 8 and am experiencing the same problem, although for me it is taking upwards of an hour to compile, taking the longest time when "processing full-text-search data".

Any advice would be appreciated!

Thanks

Pete

Captiv8r

Legend

Hi there

Where is your project located? Is it by chance on a network drive? If so, close things down, copy it to your C drive and try again. You will probably be astonished at the speed difference.

Networks and RoboHelp project files are like trying to mix oil and water. WebHelp OUTPUT is fine on a network. But you don't want to open RoboHelp and then browse to a project on a network and make edits.

Cheers... Rick

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Peter Grainge

Community Expert

Can you let us have sight of the 94 topic version?

If you can, send it via http://www.transferbigfiles.com or your preferred alternative.

You can get an address from my site. Please email that address with a link to this thread but do not attach the project to that email.

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RoboColum_n_

Legend

Splitting the project shouldn't affect the searching so don't discount that option for that reason. OK so you may have plenty of others.

I actually found DHTML within DTHML works well except where it was used a lot. I guess it is a balance that you'll have to draw between usability and performance.

Mark PudAuthor

Known Participant

Splitting the project is not really viable unfortunately, as the users need to be able to search through it all in one go...

I will try removing the DHTML from my test project.. but we use this lots (including drop downs within drop downs etc) and it is one of the "killer" features of my help system!

Sadly it doesn't seem to be one of Adobe's favourite parts of the feature-set, e.g. the snippets not working within drop downs in v7...

RoboColum_n_

Legend

I don't suppose splitting up the project is an option?

Mark PudAuthor

Known Participant

Apologies for replying to my own post (again!) but I just wanted to add that I've created a new project in RH8, and imported a section of my pages (plus my stylesheet and skin) and watched as the build time increases as I add more content...

With 94 pages added (and no baggage files), it now takes 275 seconds to build.. which is already twice as long as it took RH7 to build my 700+ page project (133 seconds)...

Peter and others, have you not experienced this with your projects?? I've very concerned that this is not going to be solvable and i'm going to be stuck with a 30-40 min build time for my project... :(

As an aisde, we use lots of DHTML Drop-down sections on our pages - not sure if others use these as much??

RoboColum_n_

Legend

Actually Mark I was just about to ask if you used lots of DHTML. I ask because in a past life I had to maintain a small help file of about 500 topics wbut which had dropdowns on most pages. What is more, it had dropdowns within dropdowns all over the place when I first took it on. Not only did the compile take 5 minutes (in RHX5) certain topics took a minutes or more to load!

It sounds like you have found something else to test

Mark PudAuthor

Known Participant

Hi again,

We had the idea that it could be due to the large number of PDF's etc in the project as baggage.. so have experimented by deleting all of these... however it is still taking 30 mins or more to build this project...

The next stage will be to try importing half of the pages into a brand new project... since this one has gone from X5 to v7 and now to v8 I'm guessing it is not as clean as it could be!

Mark PudAuthor

Known Participant

Hi all,

I will try to follow up on the suggestions about disabling the search, and/or deleting half the topics etc.. but unfortunately I'm not going to have chance to look at it today as the machine where i've installed RH8 trial is in use by a colleague..d'oh!

I'll report back tomorrow hopefully..

Peter Grainge

Community Expert

Create a two copies of your project.

In one, delete half the topics and ignore broken links. Compile.

In the other delete the other half of the topics and compile.

Does one work OK and one still take a long time.

If necessary split both halves again. I am hoping it will reveal a problem area.

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A

Anonymous

quote:

Originally posted by: Peter Grainge
Create a two copies of your project.

In one, delete half the topics and ignore broken links. Compile.

In the other delete the other half of the topics and compile.

Does one work OK and one still take a long time.

If necessary split both halves again. I am hoping it will reveal a problem area.

I'm currently trying a compile with only half the topics in the project...still the same problem so far, so I will continue to reduce the number of topics until I get a quick generation, and then try to isolate the problem file from there.

I actually tried to cancel this generation after about 10 minutes, as it obviously wasn't working properly, and it took another 5 minutes to cancel! Is there a bigger problem here?

Captiv8r

Legend

Hi there

Did you notice what RoboHelp was doing at the moment you attempted to cancel? Was there a dialog or anything indicating what was in progress? Perhaps that would provide a clue.

According to my way cool Thunderbird add in (status bar clock) it should be nearly 11:30 PM where Peter lives. So he may well be tucked into bed by now.

I think he intended for you to now try repeating the process and begin by deleting the other half of the topics and see if the issue remains.

Personally I don't find it unusual whatsoever that a cancel isn't immediate. If my RoboHistory memory serves correctly we never had an ability to cancel WebHelp generation once it began. Then it was added in. But WebHelp generation doesn't happen all at once. There are different phases that occur. I believe if you click Cancel you have to wait until whatever phase it's in to complete before the cancel will actually occur.

Cheers... Rick

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