So for the past few days my Scrivener is lagging when I am writing: a good 2-3 seconds delay.
Nothing else has changed and my windows is up to date etc.
It doesn’t seem to make a difference how many other apps I have open or nothing at all.
I’m only 40k words in so it’s not a large file either!
Please help it’s super frustrating
There are a number of things that could cause this.
There are probably other issues that can cause this and I’m sure others will jump in and let you know.
Look in the program options under General / Saving / Auto-save After. If it is 2-3 seconds, try increasing it a little. I have mine set to 10 seconds.
Frankly, I doubt that this is a cause, but I of course could be wrong.
This is the setting for autosave after X seconds of inactivity. It is NOT autosave every X seconds. Thus, the save happens (and probably quickly) when the writer is doing nothing on the keyboard and hence won’t perceive a “lag”.
Or, maybe the saves are taking a long time and interferring once the writer restarts keyboard action. Dunno.
There’s no help.
Since Scrivener 3 for Windows 10 was released (starting from the first beta version till today), a number of people (including me) complained about the lag.
Maybe with the next update they will fix the lag.
Well, of course there is, and there are excellent suggestions from kind regulars above.
Scrivener in any version doesn’t “lag”. Unless:
you are writing huge single documents – not composing out of movable chunks, as Scrivener is designed to do. That doesn’t sound the problem here, @RiordanK, as you say the issue turned up ten days ago.
For those who run into this, simply splitting up the monster has worked fine, many times, if that helps you, @NaOH, with many such cases having success to be found in forum search.
there is a problem with y our Windows itself. Besides the suggestions above, there’s something else you could do that might turn up a culprit.
First, though, be sure you’ve fully Shut Down to powered off (not Sleep, etc…), then started clean on that Windows box. As @Jestar says, there are many ways Windows can ‘get you’ if you have the habit of not doing this fully powered-off-startup-again cycle quite regularly.
It gets ‘tired’ – collects bugss until they bite – otherwise.
Now, here’s that extra thing you could do:
have Scrivener running as usual on the machine, and see that it’s actually doing this ‘lagging’ you mention at this time
click the Start icon lower left on your screen, and begin to type task manager. Probably your first letters will already select the Task Manager. Click it to open.
if you get a small 3in x 3in window without the details as in the attached screenshot, click the More details button on its bottom left to get those.
Now you should see something like the screenshot. The Scrivener line might be showing the start of a full path to your Scrivener document instead – sometimes Windows does that…
notice that the idle Scrivener CPU column usage value is very tiny – could be showing zero in fact.
now check the overall load: the CPU percentage at the top of that column. This should be well below 10%, depending on what you have running in the background and the horsepower of your machine.
the other thing you should look at is the overall Memory value, at the top of its column. This shouldn’t be more than 70%-80%, to keep your machine running speedily. Circa 50% is fine.
if either of these overall numbers are out of range, you can click the column label to order by that factor. This will likely let you see who the hog may be.
Closing any such programs so that the numbers are good should return your Scrivener to responsiveness, given you’ve already done the power-down-start-again, and that there aren’t deeper problems arisen on the machine.
the hint above about anti-virus programs could be a hidden factor, so if by this point you aren’t good, you can look into that angle. There’s plenty of advice for this via search on this forum, and fixing this has been a solution for many. ‘Free’ anti-virus often seems to be most often a problem, as a tip for that.
Good fortune, then, and one way or another, Scrivener ought to be able to run just as well as it has for you before this ‘ten days’ episode, so you can have confidence in that it will, I think.
Clive
screenshot of Task Manager with Scrivener running, here:
One thing that wasn’t yet mentioned (and it is probably not your issue but I’ll mention it anyways), is that for obscure reasons, if you used an outlined font, anywhere in the project, it leads to lag and erratic behavior. It is truly best avoided.
Thanks for trying, but the issues and possible solutions were already discussed. The problem is in Scrivener 3 and they need to fix it. My project works just fine in Scrivener 2.9 and the same project should be working just fine in Scrivener 3, but it doesn’t.
Hmm, think you mean 1.9, but then I hope you’ve been in direct contact with Support, and sent them a zip of your problem project, as I’m not aware of anyone whose responsiveness issue wasn’t cleared by the tips visible here.
You would probably do well to send them the 1.9 version as well, so they could see if something unusual occurred in the automatic conversion.
Support will give you a private way to send the zips, so your work will remain private.
Yes, I meant 1.9. Support service won’t help, cause Scrivener 3 needs a fix. The last guy who came here to complain about the lag, we did a test here. I created a blank project, and start copy/past random text into it. Then I added comments in the text (comments box). At first, there was no issue with the lag whatsoever, but the more comments you add the lag started to be more noticeable. I think Amber did the same test and noticed the same problem. You can do it as well if you wish.
Now,
a) The same project (of mine), Scrivener 1.9 has no lag issues, Scrivener 3 has lag issues.
b) I’m not doing heavy graphic design in Scrivener 3, and these days when more powerful computers come out every single day, I expect to be able to work with freakin’ words as much as I like.
c) Amber mentioned that guys (If I’m not mistaken, there are two and a half of them) who are developing Scrivener 3 moved to another platform, that is different than the platform in which Scrivener 1.9 was developed. She also mentioned that the new platform (or software developing tool) is quite different and complicated. Something like that, I don’t remember her exact explanation.
d) In conclusion Scrivener 3 has lag issues, which I hope will be fixed by the time I start my phd thesis. No matter how much I write and how many comments I have, I expect Scrivener 3 (or 4) to run smoothly, because of b).
Well, that’s a bit of a coy holdback, isn’t it. I suspect you’d better register attention for what you want by saying so, rather than ‘it’s broken’, or ‘I expect’ for unusual things.
Given Amber could see the special situation with many comments, I’d be confident it’s real, and will be on a list. Perhaps an upgrade for it will appear when the next Scrivener release does.
In the mean time, if I were doing a long thesis, I’d consider alternatives; and it makes me wonder whether embedded comments would even be the best way to go?
You don’t have to use Markdown to take advantage of all Obsidian has to offer, for example, including links, backlink, and graphics to help with relating items and even constructing networks. I suppose I’m thinking of excerpting chunks where you’re commenting at present, and using the [[ wikilinks-like ]] abilities to create and make notes, automatically attached.
I’m thinking excerpting this way because I don’t know that it would handle your entire thesis-as-text this way, but it might…
If Scrivener had the deep document links ability that’s becoming interesting in such arenas, there’d be a really nice way of doing what you’re attempting.
I thought about LiquidText, which has a recent much cleaned release I’ve been finding can be very nice for noting (and deep linking) on many forms of documents, but I wonder if it would keep up very well with particularly dynamic writing. It does have a level of abilities for updating an annotated document. I guess you could try it to assess level of usefulness.
So that’s some musing, and maybe as with other matters I’m personally working with, there’d be some advantage in diversity; perspectives from views of differing tools.
a. Scrivener 3 uses a completely different project format, so there are a number of ways in which it could experience lag that Scrivener 1.9 does not.
b. I recently helped a person who had accidentally created a 38 GB project. Even well short of that, even the most advanced hardware has limits.
c. The user with the forum name AmberV is male. Scrivener 3 is indeed a more complex animal than Scrivener 1.9, though. In any case, if he was able to duplicate the issue then it has been passed along to the development team for action.
@narrsd
We also talked about alternatives here, and I’ve tried many of them; but for non-fiction, in my opinion and the way I work, Scrivener is the best. I will remain working in 1.9. Moreover, since I have no issues in 1.9, and 3 is an upgraded version of 1.9, why would I look for alternatives. If the software is upgraded, it means that it is better than the previous version.
@kewms
I disagree. In this day and age, If one is working with a text, one should not be concerned with hardware/software at all. With respect to limits, the question is what is reasonable and what is the purpose. You could very well said that the person accidentally created a 1T project. That would hardly be a reasonable complaint. On the other hand, if someone is writing a huge novel or a PhD, and has issues with the lag or something; that would be a reasonable complaint; because writing a novel or a thesis is the purpose of the Scrivener. Say you want to fill in the census data into Excel. 500 million people, along with demographic data. If you experience lag or some issues, you could hardly make a reasonable complaint about Excel, since there are dedicated software for that, and Excel is not meant for that. But if you are doing ‘village-census’ with 500 people and Excel can’t handle that, you could probably make a reasonable complaint to Microsoft.
I thought AmberV is a woman in her late 30s with long red hair 
Thanks for correcting me. Anyway, I’m not sure if the issue is passed on, cause if I recall well AmberV didn’t mention passing the issue to the development team.
