Growing Concerned about Publisher Slow Down - 300pg Book Development

[Grimlock]

Hi, I'm developing a book, an archive of field craft techniques used in the electrical industry. I currently have 295 pages and I'm seeing significant slow down whenever I try to write text. I anticipate another 50 to 100 pages by the time I'm finished. I'm really getting worried how the app is going to perform once I start filling in the image boxes with actual images. Each page will have a minimum of 3 images, but could have as many as 9 per page, though I'd say average will be 5 per page. I thought Publisher was up to the task of creating a book, hopefully there's something I'm missing that can improve performance. I have decent computer equipment.

Specs and info:

Book = 6x9
Current File Size = 15,743 KB (15.3 MB)
Currently Greyscale, limited number of images added so far, under 50.
Affinity Publisher Version 2.6.2 (Current)

Windows 10 "Pro" Version    10.0.19045 Build 19045
Processor    12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-12900KF, 3187 Mhz, 16 Core(s), 24 Logical Processor(s)
Installed Physical Memory (RAM)    32.0 GB
Total Virtual Memory    75.6 GB
Graphics Card Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 TI

Thank you for any offered advice, maybe there's a setting or two that will help?

[Grimlock]

 

[Grimlock]

 

[Grimlock]

I reduced the undo limit to 100, and slightly increased the RAM usage

[MikeTO]

It's not the length of your document that is an issue, but perhaps the way it is constructed. A best practice is to break a long document into multiple stories. If you have 20 chapters in the same document, make each chapter its own story so that the text doesn't flow from chapter 1 to chapter 2. Doing this will save Affinity from having to reflow every following page when you edit text on a page.

[Grimlock]

Thanks for the reply. Each page has 3 very short articles, grouped with 1 to 3 images. There's no linking between the articles or the pages like a novel.

[MikeTO]

There shouldn't be any performance issues with a long book with unlinked articles. Would it be possible for you to share one page of the book here so we can see if there's something you're doing that could be responsible for the performance issues? Sometimes users download templates that have hundreds of layers, and there could be performance issues when those are replicated through a long document.

Good luck

[Grimlock]

That could be the main contributing factor. Each article has multiple layouts in the form of hidden layers. There are 16 options per article, so each page has 48 groups which contain one to three image boxes and one to three very small text boxes. It's a 6x9 book, so none of the fields are very large. This method has been going very well in speeding up the page layouts and over all design. I'm a bit surprised by the slow down as I've worked on massive files in Affinity Photo reaching over 2 GB, with hundreds of layers, maybe over a thousand if there was a way to check the actual quantity.

I suppose I'll have to go through and delete a bunch of my hidden groups that are not used enough to justify keeping them with the slow down. These are linked to the master page, maybe I can delete them there and it'll clear them out of all the pages. I'll save a copy of the book and see if I can clear them out and speed up the app. This method I chose to use for template variety has been excellent, other than this slow down issue. I'll just have to keep the options a bit thinner moving forward.

[Grimlock]

Ok, so I eliminated some of the layouts I'm unlikely to use, as well as several extra layers I created when designing the master sheets. I'm seeing a performance boost as a result! I do have filler text in all of the text boxes for the remaining layouts. Do you think having all that filler text could also be adding to the issue? I could clear out the filler text in the master sheet if you think that'll help as well. 

[Old Bruce]

1 hour ago, Grimlock said:

I do have filler text in all of the text boxes for the remaining layouts. Do you think having all that filler text could also be adding to the issue? I could clear out the filler text in the master sheet if you think that'll help as well. 

Yes, I would get rid of the filler text in the Master Pages. The only text I ever have on my Master Pages is Text that I want on the Actual pages. I also encourage you to name each and every item on all the Master Pages. Use descriptive names and keep the names the same for different Master Pages even if they are different sizes and/or locations. Keeps text flow from messing up if you change the Master Page on an Actual Page.

[Grimlock]

Thanks, I took your advice and removed all of the filler text in my various layouts.