Guidelines for Increasing RapidWeaver Efficiency in Bigger Projects

Classic General
1

Hello Everyone :hugs:,

I’ve been using RapidWeaver for website creation for a while now, and I really enjoy how user-friendly and adaptable it is. However, as my projects have gotten bigger, I’ve recently run into some performance problems. In particular, when I’m working on a website with several pages and a lot of media, I’m noticing slower publishing rates and longer app loading times.

I feel that my MacBook Pro with 16GB RAM and SSD, running RapidWeaver 8, should be more than capable of handling my projects. In spite of this, the application has a tendency to lag, particularly when handling websites with large amounts of graphics, videos, and plugin stacks.

If anyone else has experienced comparable performance problems, could you please share some best practices or optimisation strategies that you’ve found to aid with performance? :thinking:

As an illustration:

  • Exist any particular settings or plugins that might facilitate faster processing? :thinking:
  • Should I optimise my media and images in a different way? :thinking:
  • Does performance significantly improve when employing warehousing for images? :thinking:
  • Would switching to a different Mac configuration or even an update to RapidWeaver make a big difference? :thinking:

Any advice you could give me on using RapidWeaver to manage bigger servicenow projects more effectively would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance.

2

I think we need more details. For example what’s the size of a “laggy” project? Most should really be 50 Mb or less (this is an overly general guideline). How many pages do you have in a laggy project?

Guesses as to problems:

  1. warehouse your images. If you’ve added images within RW then you’ve added weight. If you haven’t optimized those images then you’re adding a LOT of weight. Warehousing essentially means uploading your images directly to your web domain in a specified folder, then using a URL link to the image within RW.
  2. warehouse your videos. Including video content inside your project is … 99% of the time … completely crazy. (There are a few exceptions, but rare.) Instead use YT or Vimeo or other options. Essentially this is the video version of warehousing .
  3. Stacks has a feature called externals. However they can have a nasty habit of multiplying across projects. Put different, externals can be eternal and add a ton of weight to your project.
  4. There could be other factors as well … not enough detail in your description to guess about other possibilities.