High CPU/Memory Utilization on HTML/SWF Published files

[Bennor3814]

When running Captivate 2 published files in IE (Internet Explorer) and Firefox the computer becomes sluggish. After some investigation it appears that the CPU Utilization is at 90%+ and the memory utilization is also high at 66 MB’s+.

This sluggishness is seen on both IE 6 and IE 7 and Firefox 1.5 and 2.0, and on Windows XP and Windows 2000. Both computers are running the latest Adobe Flash Player (v9)

Changing the frame rate does not appear to have an impact on either the CPU or Memory usage, both remain high.

The Captivate 2 project file does not contain any audio and is 76 sides in length.

Are there any settings that will reduce this CPU/Memory Utilization? Is this a known issue? Are there any other suggested workarounds?

[CrowTroboT]

I have the same issue. We have to deploy the final SWF file onto thin clients and the CPU usage rate is extremely high as well. On a 3 GigHz workstation, it is 50%. Granted the file is 35 MB, and has animated titles and arrows/bullet pointers.
I have learned that Flash (swf) especially, is hard on CPUs because of the need to decompress and decode the 'video' . Even if you have a high-end video card for video editing/gaming, Flash doesn't care and seems to use only the CPU. However, I have seen very nice Elearning videos that are very fast loading and never bog down the CPU. So, Captivate needs some core work.
All of the 'preformance' issues with capitivate and the files it renders should have been worked out before they released v 2.

[Bennor3814]

Yes, Captivate 2 needs substantial work and I too wish Adobe had spent more time ironing out the ‘performance’ issues before releasing it.

After much trial and error here is with I have found with regards to the high CPU utilization issue.
If my project has 10 slides or less, the CPU Utilization was around 15% or less
If my project has 20 slides or less, the CPU Utilization was around 50% or less
If my project has a large number of slides, say 75 slides, the CPU Utilization was above 90%

I ended up breaking up my large project into many smaller ones with 15 or fewer slides in Captivate and re-coding the navigation to open a project file to navigate from one group of slides to another. This was very frustrating and time consuming but it appears to be the only workaround at this point if I am going to continue to use Captivate 2.

The funny thing is if I export the project into Flash 8 and then used Flash 8 to publish the entire 75-slide project into an SWF file, I do not have a CPU Utilization issue. It is only when publishing from Captivate do I experience the high CPU Utilization issue on projects with 20 or more slides.

I am going to speculate here and guess that Captivate 2, when publishing to SWF, is creating each “slide” as a Flash “scene”. But when exporting from Captivate into Flash, the project comes over with all the “slides” in ONE “scene”.

Oh, and Abobe if you do read this, please update Captivate so that ALL onscreen elements (like captions, buttons, etc.) are listed in the “library”, NOT just graphics and audio as it stands now. Also add for the ability of ALL elements to have a “display for: rest of project” setting, which would allow us to edit the first slide and have it replicated through out the remaining project slides.

[jbradley88]

I ran into the performance issue as well, and discovered that the new Captivate 2 skin model was having a crazy-high impact on CPU usage.

Simply turning off borders in the Skin Editor dropped my CPU usage by more than half. Turning off borders does force the playbar on top of your content, but also eliminates the extra skin file when publishing.

For even better performance, use one of the BMP-based skins from Captivate 1 (found at the bottom of the Skins drop-down). The original Captivate 1 playbar (first in the Playbar list) takes up the least amount of screen real estate and dropped my CPU usage to under 5% at idle. It was consistently 65% at idle with borders turned on using one the newer Flash-based skins.

I reported the unruly CPU usage as a bug, and the same mechanism should be used to submit feature requests: Captivate Feature/Bug Submission Page

[Guest]

Unfortunately, 2 years later, this is still apparently an issue with Cp4. Ugh!!