Would it be possible to run some tests against this sample project I’ve created? It’s very simple (a chopped up Project Gutenberg book with nothing fancy going on, just text). I’ve duplicated the book three times, so there is now a total of 216 binder items in the Draft folder, holding ~475k words. I.e. well in excess of the scale you are working on.
Test project download (~2.2mb ZIP)
In my testing:
- Switching the Draft folder to Scrivenings mode takes about second or to assemble the 475,539 word session. There is no stuttering, typing lag or any indications of if struggling whatsoever.
- RAM usage remains fairly consistent for me, and tidy considering the amount of text and user interface being juggled around. I don’t see a sudden spike that would explain a bad memory leak during Scrivenings session assembly. There may be some leaks (we’ve scrubbed most of them to my knowledge but you never know), but they are probably the sort that take a lot of very specific types of usage to notice. For instance if I close this project, Scrivener’s usage remains higher than on a clean launch without any projects open—but that’s to be expected given how modern memory management works, and is nothing to be concerned about when opening the project again consumes nearly exactly the same footprint as before.
- Testing done on a baseline Mac Mini M2.
If this project causes similar instability for you, I’d have to think about what to try next, but the obvious next test step would be to create a quick user account on your Mac so you can throw this project into a clean environment with factory defaults across the board, no background software running, and see if goes away. That would at least narrow it down to something in your local context.