Significant slow down

Kinsey · February 2, 2016, 9:54pm

Hi all,

I’m experiencing a significant amount of slow down in the last couple of days. Pretty much everything that I do invokes the spinning beach ball; renaming sections; splitting sections; changing the focus in the binder; entering Scrivenings mode (which I work intensively in), and so on. Up until a couple of days ago, Scrivener was handling the project just fine.

It’s a text heavy project with 95,000 words (577,000 characters) including footnotes. (And it just took 2 minutes of spinning beach ball to populate the project statistics panel.) At a rough count the research folder contains 36,000 words, but there is nothing in the research folder other than documents with words; no images, web pages, PDFs, etc. Overall, the project size is 9.2MB

I have my preferences set to backup on each manual save. Invoking the manual save now causes Scrivener to freeze for up to five minutes.

Any advice or suggestions would be much appreciated

(I’m using Scrivener 2.7 on OS X 10.11.3, 13" Macbook Pro (early 2015) with 16GB RAM and a 2.9GHz processor.)

kewms · February 3, 2016, 1:12am

9.2 MB is fairly large for a project that only contains text.

The two things to check for performance issues are:

Your autosave interval, found in the Scrivener -> Preferences -> General pane. The default interval is fairly short, which can sometimes cause problems.
There’s a known issue related to Contacts access under El Capitan. Details and a workaround can be found here:
https://forum.literatureandlatte.com/t/very-slow-since-el-capitan/32228/2

Katherine

Kinsey · February 3, 2016, 1:27am

Thanks for the tip Katherine. Have reset auto save to 60 seconds (it was at 10), and removed Scriv’s access to Contacts. Will check back in if that doesn’t work

As in unusually large for a project with c.130,000 words? Interesting. The project really does contain just words. It’s an academic text, so naturally is long winded and full of observations that are only interesting to me.