Please help: Course loads very slow and takes almost 100% cpu and 1.08 GB memory

[maggiehu2011]

The total page number is 129. We used Captivate 5.5. We have several Webpage widgets and a few videos. I tried to take out the web widgets and the videos, however, the course still loads very slow.

I would really appreciate if someone can give somve suggestion.

Thank you very much.

[AndyKingInOC · Accepted solution]

what is the file size of the swf?

What percentage are you using for the preloader?  Edit > Preferences > Project > Start and End

Does the slow loading happen on other computers?

[maggiehu2011]

Hi Andy, thanks for the suggestion. Yes the swf file is only 26 mb. but you were right, after I changed the preloader from 100% to 10%, the problem seems solved. thanks.

[AndyKingInOC]

26 mb seems on the large size to me (not knowing what's in it, of course), but I'm glad you resolved the loading.

I generally tweak each larger project slightly to get a reasonable load time, where learners will accept the delay but not start calling me telling they're stuck.  I usually settle in the 20-30% range, but that's only my experience.  YMMV.

[Captain_Ibuprofen]

Just finished a project with 165 slides, audio, video, 20 quiz questions. It all worked fine until I put the SlideNumbering widget that comes with 5.5 ... well it slowed everything down and seemed to stop the whole presentation in spots. After 5 hours of online research (including this forum), I tried taking it out and manually numbering each page. Worked like a charm. Not sure if it will help you in the future, but my misery may be your gain. Needless to say, this widget is part of Captivate, not a 3rd party add-on, so I'm a little pissed off at Adobe. They should not bundle items like this that are not fully vetted.

[AndyKingInOC]

I'm curious, did you put the widget on a master slide?

You didn't specify how you inserted the slide number, but if you want to ease some later course updates, you can use the cpInfoCurrentSlide variable to pull in the slide number.  Keeps you from having to manually update them if you ever add/remove slides.  In case you did it manually that is.

[Captain_Ibuprofen]

Yes, the master slide. And thank you as well for the tips on using the cpInfoCurrentSlide variable as well. Captain logging out.

[AndyKingInOC]

I found that widgets on master slides causes some detrimental performance.  I tried a countdown timer on a master slide I was using for a quiz and it ran slow even on my machine and it's a beast. 

I don't have anything technical to back up why it does that, but it encouraged me to not use widgets on master slides.

There's also a variable that stores the total number of slides (cpInfoSlideCount, I think), so you could do a "slide X of Y" pretty easily. 

[maggiehu2011]

Captain Ibuprofen, we actually continued having the slowness problem in the past week. Then one of our developers found out the reason: as same as yours, caused by the page number widget. I wish we would have seen your response earlier. But yeah, so now we took out the page number widget and everything goes normal.

Also thanks for the tips on using the cpInfoCurrentSlide variable when adding the slide number. Thanks Andy.