This might be a Mac Pro issue as I tried RW6 on my wife’s 2012 MacBook Pro and both clocked over 150% CPU usage. I still find it a little strange as it was still taking 10 seconds to preview a demo project I downloaded and is my test ‘slow’ preview project. I haven’t tried RW7 on the MacBook Pro as it has Sierra installed and RW7 crashes on Preview unlike RW6 which works just fine!
A lot of professionals working with visual media are using Mac Pros so if this is a Mac Pro issue then Realmac should sort it out, since we’ve already established that other apps are not like this. Frankly even 150% is pretty meagre when my screen capture app is using 650%.
I am not saying I want to see crazy high CPU usage for the sake of it but I do want apps to make use of what is available rather than delivering slower performance and clearly both of us have unacceptably slow speeds using Rapidweaver.
During the beta period of RW7 I remember talk of page previews being much faster but I saw no difference at all compared to RW6 and it may even have been slower. Then at a certain point it was quietly dropped and I think they said it would be introduced with 7.1.
I’ve been testing RW5/6/7 on the Mac Pro and copied the addon folder in RW7 into my document folder and interestingly it peaked at just over 250% CPU whilst copying. I do wonder what effect the Stacks has on the preview times as some stacks heavy pages can take over 30s to preview on my Mac but surely it should use much more of my processing power!
I am not a developer but it’s possible the amount of CPU permitted for use by Stacks is heavily limited and if this is the case it’s making the workflow unduly laboured and slow.
I imagine that this is controlled by Realmac but it would be good to hear from somebody who really knows what is going on here. Like you I see similar wait times selecting or previewing some web pages.