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A
Anonymous
July 11, 2006
Question

performance on large help projects

  • July 11, 2006
  • 1 reply
  • 860 views
hello,

has anyone else experienced performance issues in a robohelp html project of a large(ish) size? i've got a project that is about 26MB, containing about 3,500 files. recently, i'm having trouble even getting the project open. my CPU usage spikes to 100% just trying to do that. i'm wondering if my issue is the overall size and number of files in the project or if it's something going on with my actual PC. i don't experience the performance problem in any other apps or in any other robohelp project (all of the rest are significantly smaller than this one, though).

any thoughts? thanks.
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1 reply

RoboColum_n_
RoboColum_n_
Legend
July 11, 2006
Hi briccio and welcome to the forums. We occasionally see posts like yours on these forums. To be honest it is very difficult to get to the bottom of these problems without knowing more. What tends to effect the speed at which a project opens depends on lots of factors (e.g. number/size of images, number of links, mapids, DHTML effects, build tags, etc. etc.). 3500 topics is large but not abnormally so. I know of authors with 10K topics and they don't have your problem. Have you considered splitting the project into sub-projects and merging them into a master?
Peter Grainge
Community Expert
Peter GraingeCommunity Expert
Community Expert
July 11, 2006
It might be as simple as the underlying database in RH needs compacting and I would explore that before going down the merged project route.

If Briccio is using X5 that basically involves taking a copy of the project for safety, then deleting the CPD and XPJ files before reopening the project using the HHP file. Before doing that you should create a CHM file even if that is not your normal output. See the topic on my site about opening projects. It is all explained there.

Also I am assuming the project is not on a network.

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A
Anonymous
July 11, 2006
hello and thanks for the replies. just a few more details to maybe clarify the situation:

-we are using X5
-we are using robohelp across a network
-under "normal" circumstances opening any help project across our network takes well under a minute
-there are few if any DHTML effects and builds tags, etc. in the project in question; however
-a unique aspect of this project, as opposed to the others in which we pretty much never see this performance issue, is the high % of graphic files
-we've thought about splitting this project into a master/subordinates structure. however, as the project itself is already a subordinate project in a structure involving 39 other projects, we've found that once we start to nest like this, we see performance issues in the webhelp output, namely it takes the TOC applet a while to load.
-i did manage to get the problem project open by deleting the .cpd and .xpj files and then opening the .hhp file; however, now that i'm back to trying to work in it, performance is still agonizingly slow, and this is even after copying down to my local drive and attempting to work with it there.
-normal output for this project is both chm and webhelp and they're both created regularly.

does this info suggest any other possible course of action?

many thanks!
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