Why is Designer Pro 11 so slow?

[Theo]

The title implies that other versions of DP were not slow but I don't recall that v8 (my last one) was any faster. Here are some example timings for publishing the site that can be found at www.meltonwaterways.org.uk. Admittedly it is a rather large site at 109 pages.

4m 05s converting doc for export
2m 25s Preparing to save and then preparing to export
1m 25s Exporting document
35s uploading (that was to add 6 pdf files)

That's about 8 minutes before it starts to upload. This sort of timing really cuts down on productivity.

Starting up DP and loading the doc takes an age too but I haven't timed it.

Here are some details about my system which might be relevant:

Dell inspiron 3010
Intel Pentium P6100 @ 2.00GHz
RAM 4GB
64bit operating system, x64 based processor
Windows 10 (Newly installed) (It was even slower with Windows 7)

Do I need to upgrade something or am I pushing DP beyond what it was designed to do?

N

[Acorn]

RAM,
Acorn

[gwpriester]

I have 24GB ram on a 64-bit system Acorn and I have noticed slowness. The most frustrating thing for me is not having an Apply button for FX effects. So every time I alter something I have to wait for the filter to take effect before I can make another adjustment.

[Acorn]

I had a laptop with 4GB and W7 just about coped. I had to close lots of apps to get Xara to generate and publish.
Much less trouble with 8GB and W10.

Open Task Manager and watch the available Memory plummet.
A 109-page document will burn a lot of memory.

Acorn

[Theo]

Thanks both.

I will shut down every other application before working on the site in future.

N

[UnmeteredIIS]

OP,

your lack of memory prob leads to disk caching...
hence memory being written to and from disk as needed.

my advice to you is to install a SSD drive...
it won't prevent reads and writes, but they will be as a
minimum 10x faster.

hope this advice helps

[Acorn]

OP,

your lack of memory prob leads to disk caching...
hence memory being written to and from disk as needed.

my advice to you is to install a SSD drive...
it won't prevent reads and writes, but they will be as a
minimum 10x faster.

hope this advice helps

Still go for a RAM upgrade first though.

Do check your memory usage with Task manager to convince yourself that you need to do anything,
Acorn

P.S. that said, I've just spend £50 (cheap) on a 240GB SSD for my laptop as it is already at its limit of 8GB RAM.

[Theo]

I have just used the rather excellent task manager in W10 to watch the memory usage. I set XDP to upload the file snf noticed that the memory usage never went above 86%. Does that not leave enough spare so that there will be no disc cacheing?