Inspiring

Question

Is there any way to optimize the HTML5 output generation?

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
October 22, 2019
7 replies
583 views

We use Robohelp Classic and our main project is very large with maybe close to 2000 topics. It grows gradually as we add more content, but it used to take maybe 15-20 minutes to generate the project in HTML5. Now it takes closer to an hour, and it seems to get worse all the time. Is there any way to cut the generation time down? It's getting to be difficult to work around.

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Peter Grainge

Community Expert

Have you tried creating a new layout? Try that and don't use the duplicate option.

If that makes no difference can you share the project? If you can, then see the Contact page on my site and send the project as instructed there. Do make sure you include a link to this thread and please do not email the project direct. I'll see how long it takes to generate here.

www.grainge.org

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C

CN13579Author

Inspiring

Thanks for the offer and sorry for the delay. Our files are considered proprietary so I can't send them out, but after a lot of testing and trial and error, I figured it out. Out of 1859 topics, I noticed that the generation was stalling when it reached a specific topic. I excluded the topic from the output and tried it again and it generated much faster. I looked at the topic and it looked ok, but in the html Robohelp had added thousands of blank lines with some rh-script tags interspersed throughout near the end. I removed these extra lines and then tried it again and it seems to work ok now. It's down to 21 minutes from 85 at the worst, so it all came down to a single file with some bad code hidden at the end of the file.

If anyone ever runs into a similar problem, I recommend using a directory monitor program to watch which files are being modified and see where it stops.

C

CN13579Author

Inspiring

The drive is local. I tried moving it to a shorter directory name near the root and it didn't seem to have any impact. I don't think IT has done anything that would impact it.

We are using more and more user-defined variables these days, and we've been using a fair amount of snippets for a while, but I'm not sure that makes a big difference. I have a second output from this project that spits out an overlapping set of 382 topics using the same set of variables and it finishes generating in about 3 minutes. So it would be nice to know what to look for as far as what is taking so long to process, because it doesn't seem to be the number of files.

I did some timings yesterday and found that the main project takes about 50 minutes pretty consistently.

Peter Grainge

Community Expert

I agree it might change things but 2,000 topics is not so big it should take that long.

www.grainge.org

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K

Karin Albrecht

Legend

If nothing of the above helps, you might want to consider to split up your project into several projects and create a merged help out of them. This would also mean that, after having set it all up properly, you only need to output the project(s) that have changed recently, not the 2000 files you are having now.

Peter Grainge

Community Expert

Is the project on a local drive or a network drive? If the latter, try moving it locally.

If local, is it in My RoboHelp Projects or is the folder deeply buried? Try C:\ProjectName.

Have IT changed the AV or backup setup?

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C

CN13579Author

Inspiring

That didn't seem to help. Looking at the log, it says at one point:

Finished preparing in 2695 sec(s)

So basically 45 minutes of "preparing." Does anyone know what that process entails?

A

Amebr

Community Expert

See if deleting the cpd file helps. I have no idea if it affects the compile time, but I've noticed it grows and grows and grows. (Ignore this advice if you have the setting to clear the project cache selected, as this deletes the cpd each time you open the project.)

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