Huge delay when writing text to a document with 30 pages and more

**dv986** · 16 February 2011, 07:38 PM

hey, sorry for not replying on time... Been super busy these past few days. Ok so, one by one:

@David O'Neil: Moving everything to another layer makes no difference, because the slowdown is not directly related to a specific page, but to all the pages depending on how far they are from the first page.

@wuerthne: I would really like to send you the file, but the problem is that this is for a company I work for, and its a website that hasn't even been released yet, and is kept a secret at the moment... but i'll try to figure something out, like, drastiaclly alter the design or something.

@neodeist: well, I don't think i'd be able to do that, since this isn't a book or anything similar, but a website design.

**dv986** · 16 February 2011, 08:22 PM

Ok I experimented a little and here's what I figured.

Basically, if you have A LOT of objects and a lot of text, AND a lot of pages, xara designer will become slower on the last pages. The greater the number the pages, the more slower will working on them get as you are closer to the final page.

Basically what I did for this experiment is created a bunch of objects and texts, then copied and pasted 100 or so times on the same page. Then I duplicated that page 30 or so times.

Would anyone like to try this as well?

**wuerthne** · 17 February 2011, 02:32 PM

OK, I will try that, but can you try whether it makes any difference if you close all galleries, in particular the Name Gallery and the Object Gallery?

**dv986** · 17 February 2011, 03:13 PM

i just did. makes no difference. I also did try making A LOT of shapes on a single page, and I noticed same slowdowns. So I'm assuming that its related to the number of objects in the entire document, and not to the number of pages.

Thats actually kinda strange, since a lot of people use xara for sketching, and produce a lot of lines on a single page. I haven't tried with ordinary lines tho, only rectangles.

**dv986** · 17 February 2011, 03:20 PM

ok, just tried with lines on a single page. Same thing happens.

Btw, could it have something to do with the fact that I'm on Windows 7 x64??

**dv986** · 18 February 2011, 04:07 PM

So, now I'm having about 45 pages and I'm noticing that undo and redo are getting slower and slower in the entire document, including starting pages.

wuerthne, have you been able to come up with something?

**pauland** · 19 February 2011, 02:26 PM

Just how big is this document?

From your earlier posts you seem to have a lot of stuff on each page. Xaras origins was as a single page design program, so multiple pages with large amounts of content may not be optimal for it's performance.

It's difficullt to come to a conclusion without seeing the actual document and having to work with descriptions such as "a lot".

A common mistake for people to make is to use very high resolution images in their web designs and rely on Xara to scale them down to a smaller size. Xara needs to keep these high resolution images in memory to do that and it will get bogged down.

If you have a lot of images, try and import them to Xara at or near the same resolution that they will be used, rather than have Xara scale them.

**dv986** · 19 February 2011, 02:36 PM

Well, you can pretty much recreate the same thing yourself. Just create like, 30 000 objects (rectangles) on the same page, and then start typing some text.

You should get the same probelm. So its not about xara not performing well with a lot of pages... its related to the number of objects in the document. No high res images in this file btw.

The file I'm working on is 4 mb big, and at the moment I have 46 pages, with about 500-1000 objects per page.

**pauland** · 19 February 2011, 02:40 PM

Yes, but 30,000 rectangles is ridiculous as a test. It's a bit like me complaining that my car goes slower when I have a piano on the roof.

Just how many things do you actually have on a page? No web designer will get anywhere near 30,000 or even 1,000.

OK, just looked back again. 1,000 objects is way too much, 500 seems really excessive too. What on earth are you doing?

**dv986** · 19 February 2011, 02:47 PM

i told you, between 500 and 1000 per page, and its not even that strange when you are doing complete desings for websites with a lot of data and a lot of tiny details. It is quite graphical too. There's a lot of tables filled with data, and to get the accurate represenation i ofcourse have to make them as acurate as possible.

So now multiply those 500-1000 by 40 or so pages... see what I mean?