Online Slowness - How to Speed Up a Mammoth Online Merged HTML5 Help System?

Thanks Jeff. I looked into that thread you posted.

We have a larged merged help system. All told, we have ~28 MB of uncompressed search_db.js files (~6MB if we use the compressed .gz files). The largest is 12.06 MB and compressed it's 3.91 MB.

However, the ability to use these compressed files appears to be enabled already on our webserver, so I assume that something else must be causing these occassional "This page is slowing down Firefox..." messages. 

I retested the searching in RH 2020 on our massive merged help system, and they've fixed the bug that was causing the search to take so long. It's quite snappy now. There is still an initial load whenever you first launch the help, but after that searches seem quite good.

Most of the time...

Sometimes (often?), it just hangs. And you have to click Stop and then refresh the entire page to get things working again.

If you're lucky, it continues to work. If not, you get the above message again.

Well that was timely. Setting up a test enviro to see if there are any improvements. I'll report back (probably next week). Thanks!

@RoboFan - Update 6 is out now (Sept 2021). Give it a whirl with your project.

@RoboFan  If you want to send me a zip of the output, I can upload it and send you a link.

See the Contact page on my site and send the zip file as instructed there. That will give me an email address that I can send a link for the output once uploaded. You can then compare after which let me know and I will delete it.

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See www.grainge.org for free Authoring and RoboHelp Information

Peter,

We have 1 parent project and 11 child projects. Cumulative, merged output statistics:

• Size: 900MB
• Size on disk: 950MB
• Contains: 26,101 Files, 1,165 Folders

Jared,

Appreciate the info. It sounds like update 6 is supposed to be released later this month. I'll be sure to test it as soon as it comes out.

I think there will be some local versus server time differences but not to the level you are experiencing.

I have no experience of either of your hosting solutions. Do you have a webserver of your own that you can test on? I emphasise webserver rather than network server.

What is the size of the output? Maybe I could upload it to where my site is hosted to see how it performs, then quickly remove it?

________________________________________________________
See www.grainge.org for free Authoring and RoboHelp Information

Trick question!

When our output was HTML4 (RH2015 or 2017?), we just placed it out on an internal network directory and staff opened it via a shortcut (no URL). No issues with speed performance.

Subsequent to that, we moved to HMTL5 (RH2017), and hosted it on a Microsoft IIS webserver (URL). Performance (relative to pervious environment) degraded. merged TOC took longer to load on first opening the site, search results took longer to load, etc.

We're now (RH2020.5) testing a hosting environment on a Microsoft (external) Azure cloud environment (URL). Performance is even worse than it is with the IIS webserver. (No changes in output.) It's not an issue for a separate, single project we're also testing. 

Dunno if anyone knows of ways to resolve this. Ideally, the externally hosted instance would be as snappy and quick (TOC load time, search results returned, etc.) as the instance I run (output to) on my local machine (where the output sits). Surely we aren't the only RH user to experience/come across this.

@RoboFan The obvious question is did you have this problem before going to Azure?

________________________________________________________
See www.grainge.org for free Authoring and RoboHelp Information

Anyone ever discover a solution to this issue? We're moving to MS Azure cloud hosting and experiencing painful slow to load and slow to return search results issues. We have 12 (1 parent, 11 child) merged projects, with 6k topics total. Speed is great when I run the output from my local machine. Issues only arise when it's hosted. I'm running RH 2020.5 and generating frameless output.