Didn’t want to start a new topic and clutter up the board.
I’m sitll seeing significant keystroke lag with Beta 29, and I can show you how to replicate it. My test machine is running Windows 10 (1909) running on an i5-8600K, 3.6GHz, 16GB RAM, Scrivener 64-bit beta 29. The C drive is a 256GB M.2 drive.
Scrivener beta 29 fresh install, default settings and file locations accepted.
New Project > Fiction > Novel. Saved on my C drive.
Under Manuscript > Chapter > Scene, start writing.
Things are fine.
And then the more words you write, the longer the keystroke lag becomes. Typically, my scenes are not longer than 2000 words, but the more I type, the worse the keystroke lag becomes. There is literally a microsecond delay between me hitting the key and the letter appearing on the screen. I imagine most people might not see this, but I think I am probably a much faster typer than average.
I wonder if it is to do with how Scrivener handles memory - because to take a ridiculous example, if I create a single scene document of 100,000 words, Scrivener is now impossible to use - absolutely slow as molasses in every function, while I am in that scene.
Keeping the 100k scene in the document, if I manage to get out and create a new text scene underneath, and start working in that, we’re back to normality. But then the lag starts to grow, the more I type. Click back in that 100k scene, it’s unusable.
As I mentioned, my typical scenes in a draft are perhaps 2000 words, so the lag never gets to bad that I am typing AHEAD of what appears on screen, although it certainly feels like I’m close. In that 100k test scene, the keystroke delay (once the app starts responding again) is several seconds.
That 100k test might be stupid, but I’ve just done in the same in a new Word document (Office 365) with 1 million words, and there is no lag or hangups at all.
Repeating the same test in Scrivener 1.9 for Windows, there is no lag, no hangups, nothing at all up to about 200,000 words in a single document. If I hit 300,000, then I get a lag starting and the whole app begins to get bogged down, but I don’t know how many words I’d need to freeze the app entirely as in the beta.
Now, there is no way I would ever write like that, obviously, but as a stress test, I think it shows there is something wrong in beta 29. Even in a short scene of 2000 words, the lag is noticeable - again, I don’t lose letters or text, and I don’t type fast enough to start getting ahead of what is appearing on the screen. But it is there, and it gets worse the more I type.
Earlier I had pasted across a large chunk of text from Word (about 10k) into a single Scrivener scene, with the aim of chopping it up into separate scenes, but the sluggishness made it impossible.
I’ve had someone else replicate this on their setup - they reported some lag at 2,000 words (but hardly noticable, and they wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t raised the issue), more at 3,000 words. At 100,000 words, a very noticable lag, and at 300,000 words, a lag of several seconds.
This doesn’t happen in Scrivener for Windows 1.9, and doesn’t happen in any other Word processing application tested on the same machine (or indeed here as I type this in Chrome).
Any ideas? Changing the auto-save interval has no effect.