Actinic Business/Designer Running Very Very Slowly

[janep]

Has anyone noticed Actinic v8.5 running very slowly - my machine has 2GB of RAM and not even half of it is used but it can take 5 mins to change between the Content and Design screens

Literally I click Design (from Content) and have to go off and do something else - similarly if I "Apply" a change it takes forever to do anything

If I didnt know the spec of the machine I would say out of memory or disk space but there is masses of both

Neither site is large but Actinic is driving me crazy at present running so slowly - stuff i should have been able to do in a couple of hours has so far taken 5 days and I'm very close to dumping the whole program and buying CubeCart instead

Any ideas would be gratefully appreciated

Thanks in advance
Jane

[Duncan Rounding]

A major factor I would suspect is to compact the database regularly.

[janep]

Compacting Databases

I Compact the Databases regularly - and have done so several times this weekend but it never seems to speed things up

I'll try again but not sure it will help

thanks for the idea though
Jane

[buspassjohn]

I thought CubeCart was free?

[janep]

CubeCart not completely free

You can get the basics free but if you want mutli site or support, etc it costs
but it isnt expensive but it just doesn't do all actinic does
but perhaps if it is less complicated it wont drive me nuts by hanging when i try and open it or move from screen to screen as actinic v8.5 is currently doing!!!

[pinbrook]

but it can take 5 mins to change between the Content and Design screens

this is not normal and leads me to think there is something amiss on your PC rather than something wrong with actinic that warrants a change of cart.

If I were in the same position I would check stuff like defrag, spyware and so on, if all of that drew a blank I'd take a snapshot and reinstall 8.5 (making sure I downloaded the full version and not a patch).

[buspassjohn]

Seriously though, I think it might be your processor rather than Actinic, we have the main sites (MU) on a Core Duo 6400 machine and its very fast, the switching from content to design is instant (or not at all when it feels like it, which involves a shut down and restart).
In the second MU machine, an Athlon 64 3400, everything takes an age, like wading through glue, I assumed this was because it had to access the db on the main machine but I suspect it may be the processor speed.
The other thing that seems to completely upset Actinic is when you upgrade V8* to V8.5 rather than a clean install and load snapshot, roll on the MySql version (September maybe?)

[Duncan Rounding]

Another possible culprit is Real Time AV protection - maybe try and exclude the Actinic MDBs from Real Time AV scanning and see if it helps.

[janep]

Brand New PC

Actinic is running on a brand new PC - Duo Core 2 GHz processor + 2GB RAM

Actinic is the only program running other than Zone Alarm (configured to give Actinic max perms) and Norton Internet Security

Task Manager shows 1.3GB RAM free and only 1% CPU usage but still it takes forever to change screen and often I end up with a white screen and title bar for ages

I dont want to turn off the firewall and AV but I may have to risk it

Thanks for the ideas
Jane

[Duncan Rounding]

It would be a good idea to check by completely turning off your security/AV just to see if it makes any difference. (You won't be at such a risk just to test)

Did you do a full install of v8.5 or an upgrade?

If it still persists raise a support ticket with Actinic - most speed issues of earlier releases have been resolved.

[pinbrook]

I dont want to turn off the firewall and AV but I may have to risk it

pull your network cable from your PC then test without firewall and AV - no risk

[janep]

AV doesnt seem to be the issue

I have killed off as much of the AV as possible - stopped as many services as I could - a surprising number of unexpected services in computer managment

I'm going to go through the machine carefully and see what got installed by OEM and get rid of all sorts

I'll get back to you

thanks for the tip

Jane

[janep]

Images might be the problem

I ran the program last night and it ran really quickly for a change - no wasted time switching from screen to screen - It was a real surprise

I did an upload also quick! and then checked the site - no images were uploaded - although no missing image errors were given

I went back to the computer and the drive containing the images had somehow gotten disconnected

I reconnected the drive and everything went back to dead slow again

I will investigate over the weekend to see if it is image location or image name/path length that may be the problem

[Stereo Steve]

Shouldn't images be in Site1 in V8? Not sure if this is what you are referring to.

[pinbrook]

disk access time seems to be causing an issue for some people.

we've had the same happen here, one of my guys said it was taking 20 mins to upload a site from their Pc where the same site took 30 secs on mine. His HD had just been replaced and voila - fast uploading returns to his PC.