Low performance when working outside the office

[Liduine]

Hello,

I am a technical writer with a moderate knowledge of Framemaker. I am doing a conversion project for a client (FM to ST4).  Last weeks I work from home and the performance of FM dropped dramatically. It takes 1-4 minutes to open a .fm file. Scrolling through a .fm file (no matter how big: from 4-60 pages) is very slow: you watch the page building up almost line by line.

When I work in the office it's working fine.

At home I have no problems with other applications, also the heavier apps like Inventor, I can open several models and work on it without problems.

The client is a small company with an IT department of 1 person, who is willing to help but he says he cannot do anyrhing because the FM application is running locally on my laptop.

I'm looking for advice. Is there anything we can do for better performance?

Thank you in advance,

Liduine

[Winfried Reng]

Hi,

FrameMaker should definitely not take 4 minutes to open a file.

Some questions so that we can better understand your issue:

Which FrameMaker version do you have? In the Help menu click About. The latest version is 17.0.4.

Where are your files? Are they local on your PC? Then the scrolling time shouldn't be affected. Or on the company network? Then it could be that it takes more time to download any files.

How large are your FM files? How many pages? Are your graphics referenced (this is definitely recommended)? Or copied into the FrameMaker file? Which file format?

Best regards, Winfried

[Liduine]

Hi Winfried and other readers,

The version is 17.0.2

The application is locally on my laptop and the files (.book, .fm files and graphics) are on the company network.

I can imagine that this takes some more time, that is acceptable, but not that much. 

About the files: I examined 2, a small one and a large one:

1st File: preface.fm - 3 pages, 69 KB, no illustrations.

Takes 0:20 minutes to load.

2nd File: description.fm - 16 pages, 1,047 KB, 17 illustrations, all referenced  files (imported by copy):

- 8 x png

- 5 x tiff

- 1 x bmp

- 1 x eps

This files takes 3:50 minutes to load

Thank you in advance for your help!

Regards,

Liduine

[frameexpert]

I think you have narrowed the problem down to a network issue. Are you able to download the files and work on them locally?

[Barb Binder]

And of course that's how you nail down the answer. Open the same large file twice: once over the network and once saved locally to your home computer. Log how long it takes each to open, and to navigate from page to page. LIke @Winfried Reng and @frameexpert, I suspect this is a network issue and not a FrameMaker issue.

~Barb

[Matt-Tech Comm Tools]

I'm not familiar with ST4, but it sounds like you're converting out of Fm.

While solutions exist to speed your FrameMaker work, they involve reconfiguring your workflow, and perhaps moving to a content management system. 

However, along with the local v. network parameter that's already been discussed, tthe manner in which you are accessing network files could be significant.

• If on SharePoint, are the files being checked out locally?
• Are the files opened directly from a network location, or stored on a cloud drive like Box, OneDrive, Synergy, or Dropbox? If so, moving to a different tech may resolve the issue.

However, if you're converting out of FrameMaker, your fastest solution may be to head into the office for the work. 😉

[Bob_Niland]

Where the problem is many and/or large imported objects (usually images), and all you need to do is edit, this often speeds things up:
View🞃Options…
☐ Graphics (de-select)
[Set]

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

Are you using a VPN when you log in? 

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

We had this issue at our company during the pandemic - I solved it by bringing all the files locally. Pre-Covid, I would RDP into a work laptop in the office & work on the files located on our local network servers as if I was "present" in the office at my desk. That way was fine for speed because all I was seeing were screenshots of the "in office" laptop.