Maximum Website Size?

[ashtangakasha]

What's the practical limit on website size in Xara Designer Pro 7?

Is there a XAR file size limit?

Or a limit on the number of images or the number of pages?

I'm building a site that may suddenly need to jump from about 15 pages with 50 images to 100 pages with 500 images. Will this size be likely to cause problems?

Thanks in advance,

Allen

[Freewind]

Hello,
I don`t know whether there is any limitation or not.
But I experienced quite often, that in many cases a split of a total website appearance into seperate subprojects with finally all linked together, helps to keep each file sizes better under control, speeds up the daily work on the seperate projects and is often more easy to dig into the "mud".
Could be a separation according topics for example, like Gallery, Home, xxx, yyy......
Regards

[gsthunder]

Hello,
I don`t know whether there is any limitation or not.
But I experienced quite often, that in many cases a split of a total website appearance into seperate subprojects with finally all linked together, helps to keep each file sizes better under control, speeds up the daily work on the seperate projects and is often more easy to dig into the "mud".
Could be a separation according topics for example, like Gallery, Home, xxx, yyy......
Regards

I agree. On big sites I will do seperate sections( especially areas that are changed/edited a lot )and just have it all apppear as one when viewed online. I use IFRAMEs a lot for this.

[ashtangakasha]

Thanks for the suggestions. I'd still love to hear from anyone who has knowledge of the point(s) at which scale becomes a real issue. At least some idea whether it begins at 50 pages or 150, or with 100 images or 500.

Perhaps someone can point me to a few Xara sites that are seriously large?

Cheers,

Allen

[steve.ledger]

There are no limitations on the number of pages your site can contain, but there are limitations on how many pages your computer memory can handle IF those pages contain a lot of image data.
Remember that everything you create is held in one single file until you export or publish.

Xara is 32bit software which although works equally as well on 64bit systems, cannot make use of memory in excess of that which can be used by any 32bit software.

Memory limts

[ashtangakasha]

So you're saying (indirectly) that Xara doesn't buffer large documents on disc, and can only handle documents which fit entirely in RAM? Even though it only displays one page of a document at a time?

That would certainly be disappointing, if it were so. Is this documented somewhere, or confirmable by Xara technical people?

Along these lines, is there any way to discover how much RAM the current document is consuming? Does Xara provide any memory management facilities (e.g., scratch disc, current document-page size, max app RAM allowed, etc.) besides the ones shown in Tune-ups?

By the way, Tune-ups reports that my cache is currently using x% of 3,069 MB, which is clearly more than the 2 GB addressable by a 32-bit program, unless Xara is using Large Address Aware and 4GT (which it may well be). The docs indicate that this is RAM cache, because they advise reducing its size to decrease the app's RAM footprint. This amount of internal caching therefore suggests that if I were to turn OFF cache control, something like 3 GB might be added to the document space.

Often, however, an app's working document size can be limited by numerous factors other than RAM footprint, so it does give one reason to wish for some specific info from Xara on this subject. Do you know whom I might contact for more technical info?

Thanks,

Allen

[pauland]

I doubt Xara are going to be engaging in detailed discussion of the architecture. Whatever they say, it won't change the way the software works and numerous people have encountered issues with building larger sites with lots of images.

Xara uses a 32bit architecture. In several threads there have been discussions on optimising larger sites and the main strategies are:

Optimise images, so they don't occupy so much memory, and
Split the site into sections.

It may be frustrating that Xara isn't optimised for large sites with lots of images, but that's the way it is.

Slegers post was absolutely correct.

[Soquili]

Allen Web Designer defaults to single page display in the work area however if you right click on the pasteboard you can change to multiple page display.

Look at the Page and Layer Gallery and every page within the current project is also shown there.

Web Designer is a vector drawing application that has the ability to export the "drawings" within a project to fully functioning html so trying to think of it as a historically typical html editor can cause confusion.

BTW 32-bit can access 3GB of RAM not 2GB.

[ashtangakasha]

I'm afraid I've misled the conversation in some way...

@Soquili: Thanks for the tip about multiple page display. Yes, I couldn't have designed my existing sites without using the Page and Layer Gallery! And yes, I'm definitely not confusing Xara with Dreamweaver, and I have no interest in using Xara to edit html! (I do that in Notepad++ anyway.) And finally, yes, 32-bit apps can address 3G if, as I mentioned, the app Image_File_Large_Address_Aware set and invokes four gigabyte tuning (4gt). But let's forget about my attempt to infer anything about how much of that 3GB might be document space. All I'm trying to find out is if anyone can offer a very rough estimate of how big a site can get before size starts to become an issue.

@pauland: I don't need any details about the architecture, truly, but I'm very interested in your reference to "people have encountered issues with building larger sites with lots of images." I'm just trying to get a sense of very roughly how large these sites were when issues began to arise. Also, thanks for the tips on optimization. I'm very much into maximizing load speed, so I'm already using highly optimized images, but it does look like at some point (when the site starts to get "too big") I may have to split it into sections. Finally, I'm not frustrated that Xara isn't optimized, but it's interesting and helpful to know that disc buffering isn't done. Coming from other apps, it's not too weird for me to be naive about where Xara is optimized and where it's not. Clearly, it's had a long and well-deserved reputation for being highly optimized in other areas, if not document size per se, and being one of the fastest and most smoothly interactive vector design apps around, since long before their sojourn with Corel. (That's why I've come back to Xara for a certain range of web projects.)

So, anyway, if anyone can give me any vague idea how many pages, or how many images, might become problematic, that would be great.

Alternatively, if anyone can point me to any sites that have lots of pages (say, more than 30?), or lots of images (say, more than 200?), that would give me something to go on.

All I'm trying to do is assess the practicality of a doing a particular project in Xara Pro 7. If these rough estimates of "big enough to start segmenting the site" aren't available, that's ok. I'm hoping to locate info like that on TalkGraphics, but if it's not here, no biggie.

Thanks to all, and sorry if I somehow appeared critical of Xara or Sledger, since I certainly never intended to do that.

Allen

[pauland]

There is no magic number for how many pages/images are good for Xara. People have reported problems as they enlarge their site and often it's improved because users have optimised images, not left to the software to reduce massive images for use on a web page or switched from PNG to jpg.

Xara started out life as a vector drawing app handling a single page. Then it was adapted to multi-page and then web generation was added. Unlike most other software, the whole site sits inside a single project and I don't think Xara is optimised to process things a page at a time, so the memory usage grows as the site grows. Currently there is a wall somewhere, but it's not on a map.

Basically, if you want to use Xara and know it'll be a big site, segment it at the start so sections are in seperate projects. It's a bit of a pain, but that seems to be the best approach.

Many people love Xara's ease of use, but large sites require careful organisation, in any technology.