since last weeks I cannot type as quick as I could and would as Scrivener is lagging badly. Very badly. I don’t know what happened, nothing really changed and typing is as usual in every other program. I looked at the time set for backups or/and saving, I closed every other program and checked for location of saving (no clouds involved.)
Now I am at a loss and already started looking for another program to work in because it annoys me so much. Because it is distracting not seeing what I wrote (it is sometimes 2 -6 words behind). Well, I do not want to switch, I love writing in Scrivener and do the rest of the work in Papyrus which is better suited for German grammar and such.
But what to do? I should be writing right now but really cannot.
Oh and on Friday it suddenly worked fine again, so I was doubly angry when it started going downhill again an hour ago. Help. Please.
Assuming you know that a Scrivener project is not one continuous document, like Word and such, how many words are generally in your documents?
Since you have an Acer Ezel on Windows 11, I’d assume you’re running an 11th Gen Intel Processor (2021) with at least 16GB of RAM, which is more than enough for a Scrivener Project.
The only other question I can think of offhand is where are your Scrivener projects stored? If in the cloud, is it necessary? Really, only required if you need to sync with another device. An external hard disk and flashdisk behave badly with Scrivener for saving, as well.
Keep the cloud for syncing backups and periodic manual backups.
the Acer is long gone (did not even remember that I put it in my profile, should update it.) So I am on a HP something with more Ram now and it works fine and rather quick although I would love to be even quicker than that.
And no cloud is involved, hate those. The projects are locally stored, they are in chapters and scenes of course and the manuscript right now is just shy of 30.000 words - so really nothing. Nothing else is running, the save time is now over 60 seconds and still Scrivener is many words behind which confuses me enormously in thinking and writing
I have had this happen on windows 11 with 64 GB of ram. This seems to primarily happen when my machine goes to sleep and Scrivener does not autoclose when it is set to. (300 minutes for me) If I exit and restart then Scrivener will work fine without lag. I can run two or have 6 projects open at once and not matter.
I have similar specs to what I assumed you had. My words per document vary from 600 to 6000, with no lag. In terms of writing, one project is 110000 words, another 340000 words and a third is 50000 word and growing. My largest project is my Characters project with plenty of table documents, now tracking around 100-character profiles with pictures. At times I have all 4 projects open with no discernible lagging.
If anything, the only thing that’s lagged in the past 4 years is my Bluetooth mouse, which I took apart the other day and pulled out threads of dust.
Does Scrivener lag wherever you may work on a project or a particular document? If the latter, I recommend you create a new document, cut the content from the old document and Paste and Match Style into the new document. Then delete the old document and empty the trash afterwards.
If anything, I run PowerToys, among which is a feature called Awake, so my laptop never descends into sleep mode and the like. Machines start in seconds these days, so I close all apps and switch off when done.
It’s good practice to clean-up browser history periodically. You’d be surprised at the 1000s of website hits you do in a week caching themselves to your hard disk. Take it one step further and Manage Browser Data by signing into your account and deleting various components there all surreptitiously talking to your computer while your work. None are there for your benefit, unless you’re interested in buying something from someone your data was sold to.
Consider using the Scrivener internal log function. This may give the support people at Scrivener a clue what is happening and they may have a solution. You enable this from the options panel. You must restart Scrivener after checking the box to have this work. See below. Turn off when done as long term can cause issues.
If you check the Task Manager for CPU, RAM or disk usage, is anything else consuming a lot of resources? I know you said nothing else is running, and while that might be true for what the Task Bar shows, it’s technically impossible for there to be nothing else running. There may be some system level task, like a global search index that is updating, or maybe even something that has crashed and is jammed and won’t quit that is stuck in a loop.
A reboot would usually sort those kinds of problems out though, so if you don’t know how to troubleshoot Services and other processes, that might be the easier approach.
If it’s not too much trouble, uninstall Scrivener and download it from here: Download - Literature & Latte. You licence remains intact.
Then reinstall. Your projects are “as a norm” not stored with the application–so they’re safe. As always, do project backups.
Before doing any of the above, note that you might lose preferences, compile settings and other stuff.
So, for preferences (things you moved around like icons or the spacing of the Editor in your interface in relation to the Binder and the Inspector), you do a File → Options → Manage → Save Options to File, saving your .prefs file to somewhere you’re familiar with like Documents.
Also, selecting File → Show Application Support Folder will open File Explorer to an area on your machine giving you folders like Backups, Compile Formats, Layouts, ProjectTemplates, ScriptFormats, Themes and files like licence.txt, userlock.id and wordlists.txt. Select everything and copy the lot. Then create a folder in Documents called S3 and paste what you copied there. That’s all your programme workings backed up in one place.
When Scrivener is reinstalled compare the differences to the new Application Support Folder to the content in S3, and pull in whatever you need in the Application Support Folder.
Sorry for not replying - I was so busy with other stuff and it kind of worked again. Right now I am back to working on my manuscript and again - lagging like hell. Right now I do not have the time really to do a new installation. Do you think it would solve the problem?
Oh, and I cannot find the Save Options to File - my interface is in German so I go to Datei - Optionen and there is nothing that could be translated as Manage and in those tabs I cannot find this save-option.
Found it, the button on the left! Never noticed it.
I have seen it suggested and reported as solving matters in the past. So, I suggested it because I did not see it mentioned.
Software and hardware are like relatives, they don’t always get on for inexplicable reasons.
So I tried this one, too but made no difference. It is lagging badly. And still: the laptop runs smoothly and is far from being exhausted, nothing uses the resources and every other software I type in works fine.
Under the circumstances, it may be best to send your project to an L&L resource to check—understandably not everyone is willing to send their work on, or restricted by company policy/restraint agreements, in certain circumstances.
Will also try another document - might be of help