Display very slow in RH8

[DominiqueMS]

Hi all,

I just upgraded to RH8 (via TCS 2). If I try to display a topic from the Project tab (double-click or right-click>Edit), it takes 5 to 10 seconds to actually display the topic in the Design tab - repeated for each topic, it makes things very very slow. When the topic at last displays, it's another 3 seconds for the cursor to appear after I click within the topic. The same thing happens each time I click back and forth between Design and any other pod.

I searched the forums and KB but the problem has never been reported with RH8. Performance used to be an issue in RH7 with iWYSIWYG.dll. I tried to revert to a former version of this dll but my topics would no longer be recognized.

My PC is brand new, 2Go RAM, 2.53 Ghz, running Windows XP SP3

Any idea what's happening?
Thanks in advance.

Dominique

[Peter Grainge]

See my response to your other post where I guessed what was coming. You can edit a post rather than start a new thread.

You say "has never been reported". That is true but then again RH8 has not been out long. That said, it was not reported as in issue in the beta testing. As you have had this problem through RH7 I wonder if it is something else. I have seen performance issues caused by virus checkers. Have you spoken to your IT people to see how they have configured things? Every file every time might slow things up.

I am assuming your project is on a local drive.

[DominiqueMS]

Hi Peter,

Thanks for your answer and sorry for the double-thread (unwanted...).

We've not encountered any problem with RH7. I just mentioned this issue because I found it in the forums and therefore tried the workaround suggested then.

My projects are local. I have disabled my anti-virus software and display is still very slow (cursor appearance after click has improved slightly). Anyway, I doubt my IT dpt will be very happy if I keep it disabled.

I've opened the Web Graphics sample projects and display is much quicker so I assume the problem lies with my projects, which were created long ago and updated recently from RHX5 to RH7, without any major problem, then to RH8.

I encounter several other problems within the projects with RH8, but I want to test them thoroughly before asking the forum - my actual problem right now is that this testing phase is very tedious due to the aforementioned performance issue...

I'll continue the testing though, so any idea on the subject is still very welcome.

Thanks.
Dominique

[RoboColum_n_]

Hi Dominique.
Do the same problems occur on a new project or one of the sample projects? If not, try deleting the project's CPD file.

[DominiqueMS]

Hi Colum,

Thanks for your suggestion. I deleted the CPD file to no avail.

I created a project from scratch in RH8, created 3 topics - and things were ok. then I decided to import a bunch of htm fils from one of my project. As soon as the files were in my new projects, topic display (and closing) became slow again. If I click in one of the newly created topics, it opens quickly enough, but not the imported ones.

Any idea?
Thanks
Dominique

[Peter Grainge]

Take a wild guess on the next suggestion. Create a new project and import the three that did not cause an issue. Then start importing the others to identify when it goes wrong. Or back up the current project and then delete a bunch at a time.

[DominiqueMS]

Hi guys,

I'm still scratching my head on this.

To answer Peter, things go wrong as soon as I import one file from an existing project in my newly created project. This will also import the related css and images. I found that if I apply default.css (the one created from scratch) to the imported files, things seem to be better but not much and not always.

I then tried every possible test working on the imported css, thinking the problem lied there. There was something strange indeed. All paragraph styles were duplicated under list styles with the prefix Kadov-P (eg Kadov-PNormal). I deleted those, saved and compiled.
The paragraph styles appeared duplicated again under List styles, this time with the prefix P- or H-. Deleted those again and now they seem to be gone for good. But the topics still display very slowly.

What baffles me is that this behaviour is random. If all topics do display slowly, some will be very slow (one amounted to 20 seconds!), others less so. This is not linked to topic size, nor to the presence of particular elements (images, bookmarks or whatever). the HTML code is clean (at least, W3C compliance validation won't report anything serious).

Well, if you have any more ideas, they'll be very welcome.

Thanks
Dominique

[Peter Grainge]

Please contact me via my site and include a link to this thread.

[DominiqueMS]

Hi all,

You'll find a workaround to his problem on Peter Grainge's website :

http://www.grainge.org/pages/authoring/rh8/using_rh8.htm

It solved the issue for me!

Many thanks to Julian McGirr and Peter Grainge.

Dominique

[Peter Grainge]

Dominique

Which file name did you create?

BaseCSS_res.dll

or

BaseCSS.dll?

[DominiqueMS]

Hi Peter,

I created an empty file with Notepad and named it BaseCSS_res.dll
Then I put it in C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe RoboHelp 8\RoboHTML\en_us

Woosh! Solved the slowness problem, and it seems I also have less side issues now.

Good evening.
Dominique

[jagarrison09]

YAY!  I recently upgraded from RH 6 to RH 8. After upgrading my existing XPJ files, they were excruciatingly slow. 10-20 seconds to display. This thread described my exact issue and the workaround (empty dll file) totally solved it!  All topics display reasonably quickly now. Much gratitude to Julian and Peter.

Julie