I’ve brought this up before (in a slightly different thread).
Are there any settings that you should have for either Scrivener itself or the computer to give the best performance for the program? For example - if you use Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom - they recommend certain settings to give optime performance.
I basically do all my writing in Scrivener and will often have at least two projects open at the one time. I do notice a lag (spinning ball for 20 seconds or so). No major problem. Everything works fine - but are there settings that we need to be aware of to give optimal performance.
A first world problem I know, but just curious.
Can you pinpoint the thing you are doing when you notice the lag? Which view, for example?
- how large are your files? (not project, the working files)?
- what is your setting for "auto save after X second(s) of inactivity?
- what version of Scrivener, macOS,
- how much free disk space,
- how much memory,
- where are the project and backup files stored, i.e. on a local folder synced by a third party sync service?
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I think @rms questions are exactly the right ones. If you turn them into answers, that’s what you get.
The more ram you have (real, not virtual), the more free space you have on your hard disk, the smaller the document you are working in, the more likely it is that everything will run well.
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Although there are a number of posts here on slow-downs on Mac, it seems to be a far from universal occurrence.
The only time I have experienced any delays it was in a Scrivenings session of a longish project with a large number of inspector comments and footnotes for each individual document in the session. The result was Scrivener took longer to recalculate/draw following any change, however small.
So my advice, further to what the others have said above, is:
- to split your project into as many short documents as still makes sense so as to limit the number of inspector comments/footnotes on each document (since that time, on some of my projects, every paragraph has been a separate document);
- to use inline annotations/footnotes if possible without making the main text too difficult to read;
- to only load a subset of the draft in Scrivenings sessions, like a chapter for instance, rather than the whole draft
- If there are images involved, link to the image rather than embedding the image in the document.
Just my ½p
Mark
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Largest project is about 500 MB - most smaller.
- Save after “5 secs of inactivity”
- Scrivener version 3.4
- 1.4Tb left of 2TB drive
- 32 MB memory
- Sync through DropBox
- Backups saved to iCloud
- MacBook M1 - Sequira
As I say - not a hugh lag but more than it use to be
Are your projects resident on your M1 Mac or are they resident on DropBox? (I mean do you load the projects from your system drive or from a sync’d folder with offline access enabled?)
If the later, you will see lag injected by DropBox and your network provider as Scrivener loads what it needs when called for. DropBox catches up when it detects available resources and not necessarily when you would like it to.
The OS may be to blame as well. Frankly, we all know what happens when your hardware stops being leading edge and shuffles into the middle of the performance curve.
From the cheep seats it sure seems like your doing all the things you can. Only other suggestion I can make is to open Activity Monitor before you open Scrivener and then consult what’s bogging the system down when your getting beachballed. I should warn you that Activity Monitor will nibble between 4% and 9% of your system horsepower while its actively running, but its the built in solution for finding what’s bloating the system.
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What are you doing with that 500 MB project? Something like loading a large Scrivenings session or “backup on manual save” can definitely have an impact with a project that big.
I second the Activity Monitor suggestion. In particular, if you’ve enabled Sequoia’s AI features, it might be “watching” what you type and that could add a bit of delay. (Same for any other background writing tool, I just mention Apple Intelligence because it’s new.)
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See sage advice and suggestions here already from @Dain and @kewms.
In addition,
- as I previously mentioned, how big are the files in these projects? Big files a consumer of CPU and memory
- Do these files have graphics embedded?
- Seem to have much free disk space. And a lot of memory.
- As you are using iCloud and Dropbox, for both these third party services are the files set to be “offline” and available all the time local? (Probably yes as to be otherwise things would not work, but asking anyway).
- 5 seconds of inactivity is kinda long for my taste. Mine set for 2 seconds so that the save is “quick” and probably often as I will pause to think, or take a sip. Try reducing that number.
Hadn’t thought to make the save “quicker”. I thought I would have to go the other way. But it makes sense. I’ll try the 2 secs.
Not sure how to find the “files” size in Scrivener. I can right click on a project to get the size but dont know how to get the file size within the project.
I’ll also watch the activity monitor to see if it tells me anything.
As far as the AI features. I havent enabled any ( Writing tools was automatically enabled - so I assume you are talking about other features. However I do have an active version (the free one) of Grammarly.
I aslo meant to say. Thank you for all the responses. It’s the nice thing about communities like these.
I actually disagree with @rms on this. In my experience, if the save interval is too short, Scrivener can try to save when you haven’t actually paused, leading to lag. My own interval is set to 10 seconds.
If it’s just text, how many words? If you have a lot of images, are they thumbnails, or publication quality?
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I’ll try the auto save at both settings (2 sec & 10 sec). See if it makes a difference. Two projects I have open at the moment - one at 75,000 words (no images); second one 50,000 words with some (maybe a half dozen) images at about 1/4 page size - full resolution.
I was also wondering whether it is the save/backup location. Both are internet linked (although my interent is quite good here). Autosave to Dropbox / backups to iCloud.