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Anonymous
April 29, 2008
Question

Very slow save time in RH6

  • April 29, 2008
  • 13 replies
  • 1829 views
Please help!

Recently my company upgraded us from RH3 to RH6 and I was placed in charge of converting all of our RH3 projects over to RH6. Following all the directions and instructions that I could find, I was able to successfully transfer over 5 of the 6 RoboHelp HTML project files without a glitch, it's the final project and the largest of them all that is giving me headaches.

RH6 was installed on a new Windows XP Professional SP2 system with a 1.86 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 75GB harddrive, 2.98 GB of RAM and 2 GB of Virtual Memory, we are also running on Microsoft Office 2000. My main project file is 223MB in size and contains 1395 topics, countless bookmarks, and 10 conditional build tags. Previously on RH3, this manual would normally take 20-30 minutes to load, about 15-30 seconds to refresh while saving changes made when working, and about 40-50 minutes to publish, and that was on a much older and slower CPU system with about 1/8 the memory and speed. Now, on this newer system, and with the newer version of RH, it is taking on average of 2-4 hours to load, 2-4 minutes between saves, and ironically onlyl about 20-30 minutes to publish?

I have tried numerous fixes that were listed out in the forums, I have read through the Snippets posted on Peter Grainges site, and uploaded the patches through Adobe (which got rid of the windows error message we were initially encountering while publishing). I have both renamed and deleted the .cpd and .xpj files, I have even went as far as creating an entirely new project from scratch and importing the individual HTML documents from the old file and nothing is working?

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
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    13 replies

    Peter Grainge
    Community Expert
    Peter GraingeCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    June 5, 2008
    How big is this project with all the SSL folders removed and then zipped. (Take a copy, trash them and zip).

    Post back before sending anything.

    I don't think anyone including me has checked your project is on a local drive. Is it?

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    H
    HKabaker
    Inspiring
    June 5, 2008
    Quoting from an earlier post:
    =======================================
    It is currently on my local drive, although we previously ran the project in version 3 off of my companies network drive and it ran pretty much flawlessly, with an occasional hiccup when the network went down with publishing error messages and login errors.
    =======================================

    Your topics may be have a lot of extraneous code, possibly in meta statements.

    In a couple of old projects that migrated from X3 I found some stuff like this in X5 or RH 6, I forget when it happened:

    <meta name="build tags" content="dontprintnow,dontprintnow,Exclude,dontprintnow,Exclude,dontprintnow,Exclude,dontprintnow,Exclude,
    dontprintnow,Exclude,dontprintnow,Exclude,dontprintnow,Exclude,dontprintnow,Exclude,dontprintnow,
    Exclude,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,
    dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,
    dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,
    dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,
    dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,
    dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,
    dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,
    dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,
    dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,
    dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,
    dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,
    dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,
    dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,
    dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,
    dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,
    dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontprintnow,dontp

    and on and on.

    I fact, I just found the above example by searching some old projects. "Exclude" and "dontprintnow" were tags I had used at the topic level..

    The current cpd file, like its predecessors in earlier releases, keeps track of this, too. So every time you get such garbage in a topic, it gets stuffed into the cpd when you close the project. Imagine how long that must take, especially given the limitations of MS Access database table fields.

    I don't know how the repetitions came about. It may have been during a crash, but by the time I discovered this garbage it was too late to trace it back. You wrote that you experienced some hiccups, too.

    As you had as many as 10 build tags, some of this junk may still lurk in topics, despite your attempt to delete tags at the project level.

    Harvey
    Peter Grainge
    Community Expert
    Peter GraingeCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    June 3, 2008
    Use Windows Explorer to create a full copy. Work on that with RH7 trial keeping the original to do real work with RH6.

    Use Google to search for other vendors. Yes it is full price from Adobe but there might still be stocks with net retailers.



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    Peter Grainge
    Community Expert
    Peter GraingeCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    June 3, 2008
    When my site comes back up, there is a complete article about Reverse Engineering.

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    H
    HKabaker
    Inspiring
    June 3, 2008
    Dan,

    After you answer Peter's latest question 2 in the affirmative, here's another consideration.

    I just noticed this comment in one of your earlier posts:
    --------------------------------------
    I also, today, tried the response which I received from Adobe's support center directly, and that too did not work. They suggested that I follow the Coverting a CHM to RoboHTML Project link that they provided me, however after all that, it did not work either.
    ------------------------------------

    Oops, I need to revise this.

    A
    Anonymous
    June 3, 2008
    Harvey,

    Your assumption is correct, yes, I do use WebHelp as the primary layout for my project. Now regarding the steps that I followed, I did not follow the steps you outlined entirely as I was more or less following what Adobe sent me. I created a .CHM file from my project, decompiled it using the HTML Help Studio per tech note 6876 and then used the HHP Builder Application that I downloaded per the instructions Adobe emailed me at www.adobe.com/go/rb_66260 to create a .HHP file from the .CHM. From there, I launched the .HHP file in RoboHelp v6 and unfortunately this did not work.

    So per your instructions, once I have the .CHM built, I should run the HTML Help Studio to decompile the .CHM into a new folder. Once that is done, how would I launch the file in RoboHelp v6 to create the new project if there is no .HHP file out there from the decompile, or am I missing something? I'm really willing to try anything at this point to get this to run more efficiently.

    I think I need a drink, or maybe even 5
    H
    HKabaker
    Inspiring
    June 3, 2008
    duplicate.
    Peter Grainge
    Community Expert
    Peter GraingeCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    June 3, 2008
    Changing the version of Office because of Access will not make a scrap of difference. It is a runtime Access database so it does not need Access on your PC in the first place.

    1] Your company are going to baulk at $80, if you can still find the upgrade at that price? If you do go for the trial, do not use on your production machine or on your original project. The html has massive changes.

    2] Where is your project located? Local drive?

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    A
    Anonymous
    June 3, 2008
    Thanks again Peter for your guidance!

    It was a long shot over the MS Office thought, just wanted to be sure that I'm trying what I can seeing my companies internal IT department has basically told me that being they do not support RoboHelp that it is my responsibility to fix my own problems.

    To answer your ?'s:

    1. If I could only find the upgrade for $80.00 any more my own boss said he would foot the bill himself to make the change if it would help, it's just that the upgrade through Adobe is now listed as $499.00 USD, and that is where I'm hitting the brick wall as they just spent (supposidly) around $800.00 just to get us version 6 seven months ago when all hell broke loose. I really wish they just kept me on version 3 as I did not have any problems there.

    2. It is currently on my local drive, although we previously ran the project in version 3 off of my companies network drive and it ran pretty much flawlessly, with an occasional hiccup when the network went down with publishing error messages and login errors.

    If I do go to the trial version of RoboHelp 7, you stated that I should not use it on my original project, will I be able to import the individual html topics from my version 6 project to recreate it into version 7?

    Again, I just want to say cheers to everyone who has posted help to my thread as well as all of the other great Q&A's out there in these forums, they have been a tremendous help to me in my solo flight (without IT support) to having my project even run at all in RoboHelp v6.
    Peter Grainge
    Community Expert
    Peter GraingeCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    May 7, 2008
    How is the Converting a CHM to a RH Project relevant to this?

    I don't think the size of your project is too large for project. For RH7 a new DLL has been issued to improve performance. Initially the upgrade cost was very low, about $80, and you might still find that if you poke around.

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    A
    Anonymous
    June 3, 2008
    Per this thread, I'm still experiencing the same extremely slow response times with version 6 and am now falling way behind in my work as I just panned out the amount of updates that I have backlogged to make and I'm expecting that it might take around 40 days to catch up, and that would be if I recieve no new work at the curent slow speed. I am currenty throwing around the idea of downloading and running the trial version for RH version 7 to see if the newer version might make a difference, although I have just one more question before I head in that direction as I know my company will not spend the money to upgrade even if it works unless I have exhausted all avenues under the current v.6.

    Does anyone think that updating my version of Microsoft Office from 2000 to 2003 would make any differnce as I have read an awful lot about the .cpd file being written as a MS Access file and thought that maybe having a newer version of MS Office would help? I have noticed that by deleting the .cpd file helps me manage the amount of time it takes me to load the project, however has no impact on the amount of time it takes to save the project between changes to the project.
    Peter Grainge
    Community Expert
    Peter GraingeCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    May 5, 2008
    How much RAM does your PC have? That will affect it to a surprising degree.

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    A
    Anonymous
    May 6, 2008
    I have 2.98Gb of RAM.I noticed that from yesterday to today the .cpd file on my project wend from roughly 7.5Mb to 12.2Mb with barely any changes actually made to the .html files, why does this increase so dramatically?
    MergeThis
    MergeThis
    Inspiring
    May 6, 2008
    What part of Peter's response "Any answers to http://tinyurl.com/6482j9 please." did you not understand? This is why cross-posting drives us all batty!

    Please see my comment in that other post about merged help.


    Good luck,
    Leon
    A
    Anonymous
    May 5, 2008
    Thanks Peter,

    I will give that a try in the morning as see what happens.

    Would you think that by having a faster processesor it might help me in getting this running faster? My companies IT department is at a loss as I have even had to spell "RoboHelp" to them on the phone to try to get assistance and they are actually looking to me for assistance in my own problem. That's why I'm in such a jam, management wants all of these things documented and published yesterday, yet no one is willing to help to get this thing off the ground.

    Thanks again for all of your help, everyone, I probably would not even be this far if it were not for this forum!
    Peter Grainge
    Community Expert
    Peter GraingeCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    May 5, 2008
    The problem is that the CPD file is a Microsoft Access database and that is just the way they work. It's nothing to do with your PC.

    You might try just deleting the CPD. It might save you having to restore things afterwards.

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    A
    Anonymous
    May 5, 2008
    Thanks HKabaker for the suggestion of the fonts sets, it appears to have shaved a few seconds off of the save times, however I'm still very slow. I have been monitoring this for the last few weeks and have noticed a pattern occuring, each time the .cpd file starts to grow, everything slows down to the point that I typically get to where nothing wants to work. Is there anything that can be done to slow the file size of the .cpd file?

    When I delete the file along with the .xpj project file and re-launch the .hhp the .cpd file seems to go back to around 7.5mb, however by weeks end it can be around 30-40mb. Could this be a potential system issue, or maybe a faster processor would help, I'm running on a 1.86Ghz Intel Core Duo.

    thanks
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