Publish Online | Extremely slow | InDesign 17.4

[StudioFerz]

Hi, since a couple of days loading of our published documents is extremely slow. Has anybody else experienced this and, if so, is this an Adobe server issue? Maintenance? Docs that were previously loading in a sec now take almost ten to half a minute to load... Fingers crossed this is temporarily and quickly resolved.

{Renamed By MOD}

[qwfqwf]

I'm using publish online to host an important presentation, having been building out this content for a couple of months, with zero issues, I am now finding that the loading speed is too slow to load video, and even pages of the presentation in a timely manner. 

Each Video is ~20-30mb, and previously loaded perfectly.

What could be causing this, it's definitely not an issue with the presentation or file size, is it that Adobe's servers are down?

I need this feature to be working or it literally useless, there's no point having a hosted publishing option if it doesn't work.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Complaints about Publish Online's performance have been increasing. First... have you had anyone test the document's performance from other places around the net? Such bottlenecks can be very localized, and come and go for no apparent reason.

That said, I am beginning to wonder if PO has been under-supported all along, and as it rises in popularity and use, the servers and connectivity allotted to it are becoming overloaded. All part of why the more experienced heads here tend to warn users not to make it an essential or core element of any business plan. Adobe tries out supplementary services like this all the time; sometimes they are maintained and boosted as use goes up; other times they are discontinued for not having met expectations.

—

[Derek Cross]

It might be worth saving the original InDesign document as an IDML document, opening it up as an incrementally named InDesign document an uploading it again to Publish Online.

[BobLevine]

You won't want to hear this, and I'm sure there are people at Adobe that won't either, but if it's that important, you should not be counting on a free service to host it. If you really need it to be hosted on the web and you are determined to use InDesign, then you should look into in5.

[qwfqwf]

Thank you all,

The thing is, it's not a free service, It's part of my Adobe creative cloud
subscription that is specifically advertised and which can only be used
while a subscription is active.

Similarly, the performance was working as would be expected until a couple
of days ago.

Does anyone from Adobe actually watch these forums? It seems to me that
'Adobe Support' consists of fellow users politely explaining that Adobe
doesn't really give a damn.

[BobLevine]

You can get into semantics all you want but if Adobe never added Publish Online, you'd still be subscribing, wouldn't you? I'm a firm believer in the right tool for the right job and as much as I get attacked for this, when I hear the word "presentation" my first thought is PowerPoint! 

[Derek Cross]

You're right Bob – PowerPoint has been transformed in recent years; it has many features that InDesign doesn't offer.  It's been reported that Adobe executives were astonished when they saw a presentation about PowerPoint at last year's Creative Pro Conference.

[BobLevine]

Back in the day, I did a lot of Powerpoint stuff and the greatest compliment I got was "no way you did this with Powerpoint." 

[qwfqwf]

How is that semantics - it's a service I'm paying for which is non-functional and therefore useless.

You know zero about what sector I am in or anything else, and yet you're asserting I'd have a CC subscription even if I didn't need this vital function. Based on no evidence that's quite a statement.

It's like some weird form of stockholm syndrome (all forums suffer from this) where regular posters are gaslighted into defending stuff that simply doesn't work, if it's a paid function that doesn't work is that or isn't that a problem?

We do use PPT and similar for presentations that don't require the level of finesse and fine-control we need here.

And yes, we could just build everything in HTML from the beginning if we wanted to spend extra time replicating a function that should be working.

[Derek Cross]

Did you try my suggestion, which will remove the crud that builds up in InDesign documents that have been worked on for "months" and that can cause corruption?

[qwfqwf]

Hi Derek,

Yes I did try that and I am very grateful for your suggestion, alas it hasn't changed the download speed of the document in question. I am 99.99% sure it's a case of servers being down or at capacity. I will add that I've also tested a totally separate fresh document without video and the issue persists.

The file in question isn't even very large, even pages that are <1mb in size are taking 10+ seconds to load - have tested from multiple devices in different regions - it's basically like going back to dial-up speed.

Thanks!

[BobLevine]

If Adobe discontinued it tomorrow you would have zero recourse. They have a history of doing so. Muse, Business Catalyst, Fireworks, GoLive and DPS come to mind. There are others. Using something like Publish Online for a vital function of your business is, IMO, foolish, and you're finding out why. How you've come to the conclusion that I'm gaslighting you, is beyond my comprehension. If I wanted to do that, I'd tell you this is YOUR fault, not Abobe's.

But since you don't seem to need my input, I'll just leave you to figure out the alternatives (there's way more than PP out there) on your own. Good luck.

[qwfqwf]

This presentation is not a 'vital function' of our business, and of course we have alternatives, for our purposes publish online for this specific document was a useful and valuable function for a number of reasons, and posting here was really to ascertain whether this was something that others had encountered or had a means of gauging the likelhood of this being remedied before we go to the trouble of converting to html and hosting separately.

Your contributions here since your very first statement have been inaccurate, snide, unhelpful, have made several assumptions without data and in my view has merely been a waste of both of our time.

I will thank you for not posting further in the hope that someone who has something in the way of constructive suggestions may be more inclined to comment. 

[qwfqwf]

"vital function" was in relation to Indesign, i.e. it's a vital function of indesign to be able to publish online since interactive pdf is now long deprecated.

[Derek Cross]

Bob can be direct but I can assure you he isn't snide etc he is a very experienced user of InDesign and a major contributor to the InDesign forum.

Anyway, let's move on – are you aware of in5? This InDesign plugin (at extra cost) may offer you some features you need:

https://ajarproductions.com

[qwfqwf]

Sure, it's just annoying posting about a problem in a forum and the response being 'ha it's your fault for using x/y/z function'.

Naming no names, another major software vendor has clamped down on people doing that on their forums with good reason. 

Yes, we know about IN5 but thank you for the suggestion - we will use it if servers aren't back up in the next 24-48 hours - generally if we wanted a hosted html end-product we'd use a different process and I think that's the point here, PO is a genuinely useful solution in this instance, and if it's not available we probably just don't use Indesign, Indesign>IN5>hosted is a pretty cumbersome workflow.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

If polite answers from a level of great expertise are not to your taste, perhaps you're in the wrong forum. This is not Reddit. Telling respondents off because they don't agree with your complaints and have seasoned advice that conflicts with your wishes is... snide.

—

[qwfqwf]

His literal first comment was to inform me that this function was one I would maintain a subscription to ACS irrespective of.

That was 100% snide, 100% unhelpful and also incorrect.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

So if PO goes down tomorrow, you'll stop using CC?

Okay. Seems like a fair solution.

—

[qwfqwf]

Yes, If adobe discontinued PO (ideally with some notice first) I would discontinue using Indesign as I would then require an ACS + IN5 subscription to do what I can almost as fast using other software and with really clean, structured code. 

The reason convenience of using Indesign is the ability to quickly harvest design elements from innumerable previous projects.

Best.

[Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com]

...I would then require an ACS + IN5 subscription to do what I can almost as fast using other software and with really clean, structured code. 

By @qwfqwf

That's an excellent idea.

InDesign was never intended to do anything with multimedia or HTML. The folks on this list have all been with Adobe's development team for decades, and IIRC, most of us were there when the early versions of InDesign were developed.

Certainly your suggestion would be less costly and more dependable than paying for a CS license that may or may not perform for your needs.

Every InDesign-related utility for multimedia, interactions, and PO has been an afterthought tacked onto the program in recent versions, and they are clunky to use, produce substandard code, and cause a lot of traffic on this forum.

Bob and others have been quite accurate in describing the situation. All of the expert users here are trying to warn you about using PO to, as you said, "host an important presentation." We're saying that PO isn't yet dependable enough to invest that much time into a technology that might not work for your important event.

Don't shoot the messenger because you believed the advertising.

[Rishabh_Tiwari]

Hi @qwfqwf ,

Sorry to hear about the trouble. We have logged a bug to investigate this issue. Please stay tuned to this discussion for further updates. 

Regards

Rishabh

[Nigey-LTA]

Don't like to say this, but think Adobe support is a total waste of time. It's soul destroying really, you contact technical support, you have the conversation again that you've had many times before, but you know you're really just being fobbed off. It's evident that technical support is based in a totally different location to Adobe proper, and my own personal conclusion to my ongoing problems is that technical support are almost frightened to pass on reported issues to Adobe engineering team.

the culture is so bad that I've even had Adobe forum professionals (these are honorary) say to question me why I should expect more, particularly as Publish Online is free. I did make the point that it isn't free, and that if it wasn't for Publish Online, I wouldn't be paying for any Adobe software. Where do I progress with my problems I ask. On Thursday this week, yet again I had the support guy on the phone, and yes, he confirmed that Publish Online documents were extremely slow loading, he even tried loading the same PO docs at his end and confirmed were slow.  Then he repeats again that engineers are aware of issue, but no set timescale to resolve. What sort of answer is that? As I say, support is something of a mind-f"x%
Pity really because the actual product is for me fantastic, almost perfect APART FROM THE SLOW LOADING OF PUBLISH ONLINE DOCUMENTS - HELP- I'M GOING MAD WITH FRUSTRATION!!!!!

[Willi Adelberger]

Can you give us information on your problem?

[Nigey-LTA]

Are you an Adobe employee can I ask?