When I’m on VPN, Scrivener loads extremely slowly and responds extremely slowly. It can take several minutes to load initially. I gave up trying to compile a project last night because it sat there for five minutes and did not complete the compile. (This project compiles in about 15 seconds on local network.) It’s been this way for a couple of years but I never bothered to post about it because I use VPN so rarely. I have this problem even ehwn I’m on very fast cable connection. Is there any setting in Scrivener that I could check to increase load speed? (Scriv 3 Win).
A VPN is always going to slow your connection to some degree. How much would depend on the service, and often whether you pay a premium to access their high-speed network if they have one.
Am I to understand you have Scrivener itself, the .scriv project and the compile target all remotely over the Internet though? Even under optimal conditions, with fibre, I’d think that would be more frustrating than working local and copying stuff up in background processes when you need to. But if you’re under some kind of “no local data; no installs allowed” corporate/security setup, I guess I can understand.
There isn’t much we can do about any of that though, particularly once you start routing your traffic through intermediate servers that have their own, likely intentional, throttling. There are no settings that are going to make it faster. It is arguably already as efficient as it could be. Compile can never be efficient though because it’s always going to have to open, read and close every single shred of text involved.
I could ask IT for more speed, I suppose. I keep important stuff on the network only. I’m away so seldom that local with offline sync/mirroring is not really necessary. I just thought that I would ask. Thanks so much for your response! k
I did think of one thing at least regarding project loading times: there is something you can do to optimise that: basically it only loads what it needs to to understand the structure of the project, build the search index, and then display content in the project window. You can’t optimise the first two, naturally, otherwise the binder would be empty and searching wouldn’t work, but you do have influence over what gets loaded into the project window. Simple extreme example: if you leave the project in a state with 300 items in a giant Scrivenings session—well, add hundreds of RTF files to how much you need to download and open at once.
Leave yourself with one single empty item and the inspector closed however, and now you aren’t loading anything but the necessary stuff.
By empty item do you mean an empty document anywhere in the structure?
Precisely, no RTF file is created on the disk until you type into the editor, which means all empty binder items are purely listed in the main binder file. So just have something like that at the top of your binder that you can click on at the end of a session as a habit, and that’ll simplify what gets loaded down to the core infrastructure. Of course a small RTF file isn’t a huge burden either in the grand scheme of things, so if you want to use it as a personal noticeboard or todo list that makes it more useful anyway.
Thanks, AmberV! With the adjustments you suggested, I was able to open and compile the project. People will be happy! k
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