How many projects can you run?

I am new to Scrivener and am growing to like it! My question is, how many projects can you run at one time in Scrivener and not have too much lag and work successfully? I have always been a multitasker and used work and onenote for all my story writing. I used to have open 10 word documents and write at once so to speak.

Currently, I have opened about 6 projects at once and it seems to lag and not work well, There are also times when I open a project, it is very long in terms of words, and it struggles. Is there a limit to Scrivener? Can it handle like a 400 page book easily? I’m starting to get a little disappointed in that it keeps freezing with my large projects as well. Is this the program, should I reinstall or is it my computer?

Thanks!

Lots of projects open at same time should be no problem … since it’s pretty much impossible for you to be actually working in all six simultaneously even if open ready to be worked on. Only one project at time is consuming CPU.

If your files inside your projects are big then of course your system will slow down working with the big files. In Scrivener you can break big files down to smaller files–the basic design of the app. How big is too big ? Dunno. For me, the way I write, none of my files are more than a half dozen printed pages. I pay no attention to word count.

Another CPU consumer is graphics. Loading and handling graphics takes CPU cycles. There are lots of posts here, and probably discussion in the Scrivener Manual on that topic.

If not done already, review again the Scrivener Tutorial. You’ll find useful stuff there especially since you’ve been using the tool. And with that familiarity, scanning and speed-reading the Scrivener manual will surely spark some ideas and learnings.

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I run 6 to 7 at a time with no lag, but do have 64 gigs of ram in 2 year old machine.

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Awesome, thanks to you both.

If those 400 pages are in one Binder document, you may experience lagging.
Scrivener works best with many smaller documents, all of which can be accessed in Scrivenings mode for a virtual continuous document.

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Ok, thanks Jevutec57, just wanted to make sure I was not missing a step. Thanks.

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The first thing to check if you’re seeing freezing is the autosave interval, which is in the General/Saving options tab. If the interval is too short, Scrivener may try to save when you haven’t actually paused.

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