Really S L O W preview

[runedog]

Can anyone throw any light on why preview in WDP9 is so slow? The 64bit version is a little faster but still takes awhile to preview in any browser I throw at it?

I have 12gig of RAM, a i7 CPU and a SSD on-board. My old web designing software has nearly instant previewing.

Hope some can help.
Graham

[pauland]

My old web designing software has nearly instant previewing.

That's almost certainly because it's manipulating HTML, so no big stretch to have it previewed.

Xara has to generate the page HTML before the browser can display it.

How slow is 'slow'?

[Acorn]

Graham, I have 32-bit, 3GB, Intel(R) Core2 Duo and with a brand new file and a 30-point star, with Bevel and 3D modelling, I rendered this from first use in under 1 second.
I clone the extrusion (2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256) times and get increasing times of (1, 2, 2, 3, 4, 6, 10, 17) seconds, roughly the square root of the number of extrusions.

With Windows Task Manager, my processor activity has a similar spike height and width when Xara is rendering; the delay seems to be down to IE displaying through Xara virtual server.

I open the images in each of my available browsers and to be honest I could only state Chrome was quicker. This doesn't help you in a development cycle as the Preview is an IE one.

I would be happy to swap machines.

Acorn

P.S. On my 64-bit 8GB laptop, which is currently elsewhere, I have noticed it initially takes longer to render the first time but it is far quicker thereafter.

[PeteS]

Are you previewing a page, or previewing the website Graham?

When you click Preview (whether it's page or website) the program goes through a number of stages before it will load the preview windown displaying your site, it has to export all of the bitmaps in the file, convert all pages to HTML and then load it into a browser (it has about 3 stages in the program to do this).

If you are previewing the website in a very large website document (eg 70 pages, with 500 images etc) then that will take longer to complete than previewing a single web page with a couple of rectangles and image and some text - just as 2 extreme examples.

[PeteS]

In addition to the above, prior to previewing your site/page it's always a good idea (once you have added more images to the document) that you optimise all images.

Select Utilities > Optimise all Images and click Optimise. Once that's finished, click OK and then save the document and close the program. Reopen your document and then preview the site/page again.

This will optimise the images in your site to a much moire acceptable size and free up current memory resources that are being used by the program (by unneccesarily large images). Restarting the program after optimising the images is an important step, else the memory is not freed up.

[runedog]

The above does help Pete, many thanks. It does seem a long-winded way to increase preview speed though, having to restart the program.

Many thanks anyway
Graham

Now my next issue is the text spacing differs in different paragraphs?

[PeteS]

It's good practise to optimise your images after importing them. Due to the way images are stored in the document, large numbers of images and large images can use a larger percentage of system resources - especially if you're using a 32 bit version which is limited by Windows anyway to, in some cases is a much smaller amount of RAM than your computer has installed.

Of course, if you have optimised the images and then have not imported any new images into the document between then and the next time you want to preview the site, then you don't need to re-optimise them because there will be none to optimise.

[PeteS]

Now my next issue is the text spacing differs in different paragraphs?

Have you published your site somewhere where we can see this online, or can you either post your .web file here or submit it to the support team at http://support.xara.com

Thanks