Using Scrivener spins up the fan on my new iMac

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
1

When I use Scrivener on my new iMac, it spins up the fan to 2800 RPM. I assume this means Scrivener is taking a lot of my Mac’s resources, heating up the CPU, so the Mac is trying to cool it down. But it’s very annoying and it doesn’t happen with the other apps I regularly use (Word, Chrome, Evernote, etc.).

Are there any settings in Scrivner that would make it less resource-intensive on my Mac?

Thanks, Brian

2

Hey, Brian,

Fellow user here. I have never seen Scriv be the culprit on this. At times when my mac heats up but I am not doing something intensive, like video processing, it often turns out to be Safari — which I do tend to leave up, but is not frontmost application at the time.

A) You’ve probably covered this, but to peg the culprit, you really need to quit whatever other programs might be up and including any background utilities you might be running. It is not enough that you happen to be using Scriv when the heat-up happens — the frontmost app is not necessarily the culprit.

B) From your note it sounded like you haven’t yet checked the Activity Monitor utility to see just who is burning a hole in your CPU time. You should definitely do that.

C) By the way, what OS are you running?

3

Thanks for your insight. I do use Activity Monitor. I think the combo that’s causing the problem might be Scrivener + Microsoft OneDrive, which I use for cloud backups. I know that when I manually upload a file to OneDrive, the fan spins up. So maybe Scrivener’s automatic backups are heavier than, say, Word’s backups. Evernote backs up independently of OneDrive. And Chrome, of course, is not backing up at all…

4

I’m not sure what Word does for backups, but Scrivener creates a separate copy of the entire project and optionally .zip compresses it. Check the Scrivener->Preferences->Backup pane for what events trigger a backup (opening or closing a project, invoking manual saves, etc…). Alternate locations for backups on a per-project basis can be found in Project->Settings->Backup.

It seems odd to me though, that it would heat up your computer for very long. Even uploading a new file that’s made from a fairly large project shouldn’t take all that long.

5

Are the “cloud backups” the backups created by Scrivener on e.g project close or manual save, or do you mean that your live project is located in the OneDrive folder on your Mac so that you get a kind of cloud backup?

6

Yes, the live project is located in the OneDrive folder on my Mac, so it’s always uploading as soon as Scrivner auto-saves a change.
[/quote]
Are the “cloud backups” the backups created by Scrivener on e.g project close or manual save, or do you mean that your live project is located in the OneDrive folder on your Mac so that you get a kind of cloud backup?
[/quote]

7

There you have the explanation…

I hope you’ve read the advisory on OneDrive and Scrivener.
scrivener.tenderapp.com/help/kb … e-advisory