RH8 hangs with 100% CPU when closing a topic. Resource Manager to blame?

[symmetricalMan]

Please refer to the following thread for background information: http://forums.adobe.com/thread/734972?tstart=0

I'm re-listing this issue, as it has rasied its ugly head again, and I've no resolution this time.

Summary:

The original issue was that RH8 would hang whenever I closed a topic for anywhere between 15-30 seconds before allowing me to interact with the application again. Attempting to interact with the GUI during this freeze would result in the 'Not Responding' message at the upper-left of the application window (suffice it to say I'm on a PC with Windows).

After much investigation it was suggested to me that my profile may be corrupt, and in order to test this, another user should log on and see whether they experienced the same problem. As it is, they did not. So I had my Systems Admin recreate my domain profile, and everything worked just fine.

...until now.

Last week we all upgraded from Windows XP to Windows 7 (32 bit). We also changed our anti-virus software. The awful hanging issue in RH has returned.

We've attempted the solution from last time, by recreating my profile on the domain, to no avail. We have in fact gone to the extent of reformatting the hard drive and reinstalling Windows, the anti-virus software and RH8 (plus all available patches) from scratch. In case anyone is wondering, we've tried running RH without the antivirus installed, and when installed have also tried excluding the RH application folder and all my project folders, just in case it was the anti-virus software at fault. Regardless, the RH problem exists.

I can't understand why I'm now having this problem. Truth be told, I never really understood why recreating my domain profile in the first place resolved the problem last time.

However, I have now discovered something else...

In my RH Resource Manager I have a few thousand images in the Image folder. Not much I can do about this - the applications I write Help for have many screens users can access, and I write the Help for half a dozen applications. When I delete the contents of the images folder within the Resources Manager, RH works perfectly - no hanging whatsoever. As soon as I import the images into this folder again, the hanging is back. I have tested this a few times now, and have rebooted and had another user log on to confirm, and it happens every time. I'm dumbfounded of course, particularly because the same set of images has been sitting in the Resource Manager for months (since my original post about this issue, last year), and RH has been working perfectly.

I've also tried Peter Grainge's suggestion to create an empty BaseCSS_res.dll file (http://www.grainge.org/pages/authoring/rh8/using_rh8.htm), but as I've installed all the RH8 updates, this shouldn't be an issue.

I've also tried deleting the CPD file without success.

Thanks in advance.

[Peter Grainge]

You've tried what I would have suggested so let's see if the issue is your project or your installation.

Open one of the sample projects and see if you then get the same problem. Click Open on the RoboHelp Starter page and then click Samples in the ribbon on the left.

---

See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[Peter Grainge]

Sorry, that wasn't very well put. It likely is what you have identified but I need to establish it also happens with the samples as they are known quantities.

Meantime I am trying to find out more. It could be the number of images but it could also be network related.

---

See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[Peter Grainge]

I have received this response.

make sure that the project folder itself is not added in the RM. If this is the case, then whenever the topic is saved it, will trigger folder change notification and RM will start reconciling the folder changes. In this case there are many files, so it may take up some time.

---

See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[symmetricalMan]

Thanks for the quick response, Peter.

Some feedback to your suggestions:

• My project folder is not within the RM itself,
• I have the same problem with the sample projects; when my images folder in the RM is populated (some 4,213 images), RH hangs. Delete the images from the RM, problem solved.

Is it a problem with the quantity of images? Perhaps. But, this was working fine up until I updated to Windows 7. Perhaps that's the problem; RH8 is not (completely) Windows7-compatible, as Adobe think. I'm really hoping that's not the case.

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

How much RAM are you running now with the Win7 system? It might make sense to go to Win7 64bit to take advantage of the expanded addressable RAM limit of 64 bit systems.

[symmetricalMan]

It seems this has been resolved!

Many thanks for all the suggestions. Peter ultimately forwarded the solution - something that he'd sourced from a rep at Adobe, as follows:

Every file/folder change in the root folder of RH8 Resource Manager triggers a rescan of all the sub-folder/files. That is why in case of thousand image it will take time. Like xxxx said we may ask user for root folder, it should not be project folder or frequently changing folder.

Probably he is using the default path given in the root folder and RoboHelp changes a temporary css file in that folder very frequently, in fact with every topic close.

That is causing the slowness and it should be easy to reproduce in the default scenario. This is RH8 only issue.

So, to fix my issue:

1. Open the Resource Manager Pod.
2. Click the Add/Edit Categories icon. The Add/Edit Categories window appears.
3. Within this window, change the 'Root Folder' path to something other than the default. In my case, I create a new folder on my root hard drive, outside of the Robohelp folder, just to be sure.

So far this is working perfectly - no 'hanging'. I'll keep an eye on it.

I love the comment "This is RH8 only issue."

Oh?! Is it? Was it fixed in a patch, Adobe? Please don't tell me that it was fixed in RH9, because there's no way known I should have to pay for an upgrade to resolve something that certainly looks like a bug. As happy and grateful I am to have this resolved, it has cost me a week's work.

[Captiv8r]

LOL, I consider Resource Manager itself to be a bug in RoboHelp 8. It was cute, but not really useful until 9 introduced a better model that actually became useful!

Cheers... Rick

Helpful and Handy Links RoboHelp Wish Form/Bug Reporting Form Begin learning RoboHelp HTML 7, 8 or 9 within the day! Adobe Certified RoboHelp HTML Training SorcerStone Blog RoboHelp eBooks

[Peter Grainge]

I can understand your frustration at having lost a lot of time but once you shared the problem, Adobe did come up with the answer and the solution would not have required anyone to upgrade.

Just to clarify the answer, the RoboHelp folder referrred to is My RoboHelp Projects, the location where the sample projects can be found.

---

See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[symmetricalMan]

I'm not sure if I should be 're-opening' this discussion or creating a new one...

I've recently upgraded to RH10  (running 10.0.0.287), and the original awful problem I was having has reappeared.

To summarise; the problem with RH hanging every time I added a new image to the folder the Resource Manager was monitoring was resolved by relocating the image folder to the root drive on my computer.

With having not changed anything (i.e. the images folder is in the same location, and RH10's Resource Manager is configured to look at it), upon dropping a new image in that folder, RH hangs for 1m40s whilst it refreshes itself.

This delay happens regardless of whether I:

• Move the folder to another location (and configure RH to point to it)
• Disable automatic refreshing of the Resource Manager (i.e. forcing a manual refresh has the same effect)
• Change the automatic refresh delay.
• Instruct RH to use the shared resources 'As Copy' or 'As Link'.

This images folder admitedly has over 6000 gifs in it (the programs I document are complex), but RH8 had no problem with this once I'd configured the Resource Manager correctly.