[RC 21] General performance problems.

Scrivener Windows Beta (Archived)
1

I am noticing lag just editing one 20k word section, in a document with three sections of comparable size. Clicking to move around within a document section has a noticeable delay between clicking in the new spot to seeing the cursor show up and start to blink, sometimes a full second. Switching between sections of my book (max 22k words per section right now) can take 2-3 seconds, and monitoring CPU utilization shows a spike to 2-3% for Scrivener when I do that. Clicking within a section only spikes to 0.5% at most, usually 0.1% to 0.2%.

My system is pretty beefy and I don’t have performance problems with other tasks, including gaming, graphics design, and software development with Visual Studio. My system is an AMD 3900X with 32GB of DDR4 and a decent 1TB M.2 system drive, which is where I also save my documents. It should be overkill for an application like this.

I really want to use Scrivener. I know it’s a beta and bugs are expected. I wouldn’t use the beta, but my eyes can’t deal with white backgrounds. My whole reason for buying it and using the beta was to use the themes functionality. This performance issue is very distracting and pulls me out of my focus. There’s no way I’ll be able to use Scrivener full time like this.

Do I need to split my sections up into smaller pieces? By chapter instead of by parts? MS Word was able to easily handle documents of this size decades ago. It did not have the same features as Scrivener, but nice features don’t matter if the program isn’t really usable in its current form.

Edit: A few more system details. I’m using Windows 10 Pro and the 64 bit version of the Scrivener beta. Also I updated the CPU, I had my old CPU listed. I tried both the 32 bit and 64 bit versions.

2

I haven’t noticed any significant changes on my end - it’s still as fast on my desktop, and still as slow on my laptop. I don’t mind files being a second or so to open as long as text appears the instant I type it. Some other word processors delay the text. Feels so weird when that happens. What’s everyone else’s experience like?

It takes about 4 seconds to open my project on my desktop PC, with ~1.1 million words. No pictures though, just words.

It takes about 1-2 seconds to open a 19000 word file. For me I figure that’s about normal?

My laptop is a lot slower, but the laptop is over a decade old vs the 9900KS here.

I do recall the program crashing/hanging when it attempted to load every file at once by clicking the Manuscript file/folder though, since by default that wouldn’t list the names of sub-files and instead would load all their contents. Fortunately it lists things now instead.

3

I split everything up into chapters (about 40 total, it took me a little while) and it seems to be performing fine now. Switching between chapters is almost instant, clicking to new points in a document is fast enough not be an issue.

Apparently not everyone has performance issues. I wonder what the common denominator is?

4

The same issue was discussed recently: https://forum.literatureandlatte.com/t/rc20-performance-worse-than-ever/94910/1
Likely related to the 20K section size.

5

Same issue, freezing during moving cursor. Pretty big project, but haven’t that problem in beta windows. But as soon as I downloaded 3.0.0 it starts. Hope fix it in the next update.