Name gallery slows Xara down

[Markku]

Has anybody experienced this?

If you create a document from scratch to test this, then you won't see it happen. But I've found it all too often that when I open some larger projects like multi-page websites, it is frustrating to have the Name gallery even open, let alone to work with it. So I've stopped using it, which is a pity since as a concept the Name gallery is very useful.

[steve.ledger]

Hi Markku,

Sorry but I'm unable to fully appreciate what you are saying?

Are you saying that we can't test this?
Or are you saying that simply having the name gallery open while a large (complex?) document is active, slows everything down?
Can you supply an example?

[raynerj1]

I have heard of one of the galleries slowing things up. I think it was the name gallery. A work around would be just to open it when you need it and keep it closed other than that.

[Nostaw]

The name gallery is pretty useless when using more than 3000+ objects. If you click on the name gallery when using so many objects, it takes forever for xara to select them. The project i was doing had around 120 icons for a software application and i kept all the icons on one work page and copied bits and pieces of other icons to make new ones to match the style.

[Markku]

sledger: of course you can test it. I just tried to say that you should not expect to see any slowdown if you just create a new document in testing purposes and lay down a few objects in it.
To see the slowdown you need to open up some older project of yours that has quite a many objects like Nostaw said.

Whether or not I had as many or more than what Nostaw said (3000+) that I don't know, but it would be nice to know whether there is some sort of threshold after which the performance becomes sluggish.

But judging be what raynerj1 and Nostaw said, there seems to be a general problem with this, so it is not just my PC's fault.

I hope this limitation will be addressed in the future.

[Egg Bramhill]

It definitely slows my system (very old) to a crawl. I tried a test file with 40,000 shapes. Opening the name gallery took forever, even though there was only 2 named colours and no named shapes.

I created the file by creating a 200 step blend between a star and a circle, converting to editable shapes, clone, move to bottom of page and do another 200 step blend.

Finally Convert to editable shapes, Ungroup, Ungroup.

I tried attaching it here but it was to large.

[Markku]

Thanks Egg for giving such exact data to compare with.

In one of my most recent projects I only had 1450 objects across 7 pages and there were 19 layers most of which for pop-up purposes. I had no named objects, except one ghost object by the name of "0" that Xara adds by itself. There were around 30 named colors. With this setup Xara was mildly sluggish.

But just when I added the first and only named object, the world's fastest graphics software became slower than slow. There has got to be either fault in the code architecture or a pure memory leak.

My PC is a Dell Latitude D820, with Intel 1,83GHz DualCore and 2 GB of memory.

[cubswinn]

I have also experienced this problem. I started a thread on it last Nov. I don't see a solution other than working creatively with layers as a "work-around".
John

[Markku]

cubswinn; you know I tried to do a search about this topic "Name gallery" to see if anyone else had already reported it, but I couldn't because the word "Name" is too short or common, so all I got were the results for "gallery". Either I'm not enough tech-savvy to use the search on this forum, or the search really is too restricted. So sorry about that.

[wuerthne]

I have fixed a huge Name Gallery slowdown problem recently that slowed everything down to a crawl starting from a few thousand objects on the current page. This fix really makes the Name Gallery fly. So, you will probably find that this issue is resolved in the forthcoming V5 release.