I just happened to notice today that my main novel in progress is well currently 277.3 MB. The BinderStrings.xml file alone is 13.8 MB. (My second largest project is 25MB, and I even have a full novel draft in one that’s under 10 MB, but I don’t think there’s any research in that one.)
At what point does a Scrivener project count as “large”?
EDIT: I’m asking because I recall seeing KB mention something about the saving working differently for a large project, and I’d like to know when that is. I’m getting lag with my big one.
It’s sort of relative, really. Your big one is big mainly because the binder strings file is large - because there is a lot of text in it (whereas a file with a similar size caused by images and movie files etc would not cause so much slowdown). Even so, the binder strings file doesn’t get saved during auto-saves in order to avoid lag, so I’m surprised you are getting such a lag. When does it occur? During auto-saves? (By contrast, manually saving does save the binder strings, so saving would be slower; but auto-saves should remain quick… In theory.)
I am up to 1.18 GB on my Sports History book as I import every piece of research, pdf’s, web pages and wp files into it so they are with me when I am writing a chapter. I don’t know if this would give Keith palpitations, but it seems to work fine and I back up with Time Machine and manually with two external hard drives, just in case.
It isn’t a huge lag, and it mainly pops up when I try poking into my Research folder. I’m asking out of curiosity, not irritation.
I have a G4 14" ibook with maxed RAM (1.25 GB) and Leopard, so I wouldn’t be surprised if at least some of it is my computer. It seems to get worse when I start looking at webarchives in the Research folder.
I don’t have much time this weekend to write, but if I notice some other factors, I’ll make sure to let you know.
And here I thought I was asking a simple numbers question!
Web archives are generally slower anyway, because unfortunately the way they work is that they don’t download all resources - images often don’t get cached and so have to re-download from the internet each time you open them (I head that Apple had changed this behaviour in the new version of the WebKit but haven’t had time to check if this is indeed the case). So that may account for some of it. Also, because Leopard was optimised for Intel machines, the text system runs slower on PPC machines - there were quite a few reports of these problems when Leopard was first released. And finally, Scrivener doesn’t hold media files in memory (which could consume lots), only text files, so opening text files should always be a little faster than non-text files. So it may be a combination of all of these things that is causing the lag.
All the best,
Keith
