Speed/Page publishing/Sitemap issues

[grahamrhind]

Hello,

Web Designer MX Premium

I'm having a number of issues with speed and export which I'd appreciate some pointers/help with:

1) As my website gets bigger (51 pages now, it will end up at about 100 pages, which I don't think is unusual) the speed of MX Premium slows down greatly, specifically with editing and publishing.

2) It currently takes about 1 hour to publish the site even though "Re-publish changed files only" is checked, because though it only uploads changed files it still exports and processes every page, even those unchanged. Is there a way to export and publish by page instead of by site, or is there a way of speeding this process up?

3) A solution might be to split the site into a number of different project files, but then I foresee a problem that the sitemap produced by each separate project will not include the information from the other projects. Is there a way around this? Can sitemaps be merged or can the robot.txt be made to look at multiple sitemaps?

Thanks in advance for any pointers!

Graham

[Drwyd]

Hi Graham, welcome to TG

Have you tried optimising images ? This is usually the primary cause of slowdowns.

[grahamrhind]

Thanks Drwyd. I'll try that (though I note it only optimises per page - a whole site option would certainly make things easier!)

[gwpriester]

The Help file entry for Photo Optimization states:

Or you can use the "Utilities" > "Optimize all images" facility to optimize all the bitmap images in your document in one operation.

I have never tried this so I am not sure if it does the entire site or just the page, but it reads like it does the entire site.

Help also adds:

Right click a photo and choose Optimize Photo or choose "Utilities" > "Optimize photo..".. This dialog performs three important functions:

• Removing invisible parts of photos
• Reducing resolution of photos

• Converting PNG or bitmaps to embedded JPEGs to optimize file size

Which makes a lot of sense. Even if you crop a high resolution image (which is going to export at 96dpi regardless), Xara maintains the entire image in the Bitmap Gallery. After a short period of time, you can have a tremendous load of high resolution images. So if you optimize the image you actually create a new image, cropped and reduced to Windows screen resolution.

This is a destructive process however. So keep copies of the original photos in another folder in case you need them again or want to use them for high quality printing.

[grahamrhind]

I did respond to this but it hasn't appeared, so I'll try again.

The Optimise photos option probably does apply to the whole site as it feeds back that 23 photos are optimised regardless of which page I run it on. However, the pages are not graphics heavy and the optimisation hasn't speeded it up, so if there are any other ideas they'd be much appreciated!

[Drwyd]

Hi Graham

I downloaded one of your pages into WD and duplicated it x25, it brought it to a standstill and I've not been able to pin down the main cause. I would contact Xara and see of they can shed any light on this. The developers visit here now and again so they may spot this thread.

[GerryI]

Are you saying you have the original .web version of one of the pages and you duplicated it 25 times and the program gets very slow? We would like to see this. Please either open a support ticket at xara.com or attach whatever is necessary here (if not private) and describe exactly what you do after opening the file.

Thanks,
Gerry

[Drwyd]

Hi Gerry, no not the original .WEB file. I imported from the web (http://www.grcdi.nl/linkspc.htm)

[grahamrhind]

Update: The patch for version 8.1.2 speeds my 86-page website publication from well over 3 hours to 1.25 hours, so still not the speediest but a huge improvement.