Project Size and Multiple CHMs

[STORIS]

I'm looking for some information on the affects/dangers of large projects and the feasability of breaking up a large project into several smaller ones and linking them together.

From time to time, we experience significant speed issues when loading and editing topics.  How much does project size affect this? At what point does a project's size become "dangerous"? Can a project get so big that is damages itself (i.e., corrupts files, etc), or does it just reach a point where it won't compile anymore?

We use RoboHelp 7 HTML, but are considering upgrading to Robo 9 and also to Windows 7 (64-bit, I believe). We use Sourcesafe. Certainly moving the project to a faster machine would speed things up, but I'm wondering if we'd still want to break up the project into smaller projects to improve speed and ensure the project does not get too big.

Our project has 1767 topics. We have begun to add more graphics to topics, although the overall number of graphics is small.  We generate CHM and webhelp. The CHM is 13.8 megs. The folder for the compiled webhelp is 61 megs.

[Peter Grainge]

I would not have thought that size of project should cause performance issues. I have some projects with over twice that number of topics and a fair number of graphics.

I would start investigating by taking a copy of the project out of source control and trying it on a different machine with reasonable performance. I think this is more an environment issue rather than one of project size.

---

See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge