Multicore/multiprocessor support please!

My suspicion is that the RealMac team develops, benchmarks and troubleshoots on computers that have nothing else installed and used on them besides RW, therefore their experience is much different than that of real-life users…

@Rovertek @ashleykaryl you realise that I am part of the Realmac team - right? I’m not just showing you that it works on my machine - I’m showing that we’re actively working on the stuff you’re asking for.

I’m not sure what else I can do to show you, so I guess you’ll just have to wait and see.

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Yes I realised that. Is this likely to make it for 7.1?

Hi Simon, I seem to have opened Pandoras box with the ‘multiprocessor’ shenanigans! It’s great that you are working on more support for multiple cores. I have no problem with exporting a site as you don’t do it that often. Previewing a page is the main concern as you spend a lot of time checking the changes you make to a website so 10-30s per preview can add up to a lot of wasted time during a working day! That is why I have a Mac Pro but it is working at the same speed as 7 year old bottom of the range iMac with RW7. If you are like me and have many $$$$$ worth of plugins/Stacks/themes so am in it for the long haul! Good luck with the programming!

@simon Speaking only for myself… I have submitted several emails to RealMac support and the support just isn’t there. I’ve gotten a reply to one (after PM to Dan). So far there has been no meaningful dialog even though I supplied details and four sample files. 3rd party developers are so much more responsive and helpful. After days and days of waiting for a reply to my email detailing publishing issues the reply back to me was “Can you export site.” When I replied that I have over 1700 pages and don’t care to Export Site every publish the reply (days later) was “Are you using the latest version.” Very very frustrating.

@jspencer2
Which kind of pages are taking that long to preview? Any special stacks or CMS systems?

@jspencer2 a page is exported every time a preview is generated. Improving export will have a drastic impact on both previewing and publishing.

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@1611mac sorry you’ve been having trouble with prompt replies from support. I don’t get to see any of their backlog but I suspect it’s pretty huge.

Keep with it though - they do regularly pass us projects to look at that customers have sent in, and we’ll often send questions back to help us debug the issue. Or we’d like to know if doing something a different way works instead (that can help us nail down the problem sometimes, and provides you with a way to keep working while we investigate).

Sometimes it’s because we thought an issue had been fixed, but an email from a customer suggests it might not have been - so if you haven’t included the version of RapidWeaver that you’re using in your email then we’ll have to ask for it just to rule it out.

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Simon: I understand… -edited- delete

@Rovertek I’m one of the developers at Realmac and can tell you that we all run a substantial amount of software on our machines. RapidWeaver is a very complicated application and has been poked about a lot over the last 15 years by a number of developers. The export/preview process is extremely complex and requires certain parts to be run sequentially, not concurrently. That being said, we’ve been working towards multicore processing for some time now, and more recently Simon has done some excellent work in making it happen. I personally think it’s amazing that a piece of software is still being so actively developed after such a long time. Many companies would just ditch the old software and make something new. Take Apple’s Final Cut Pro 7 for example.

AFAIK RapidWeaver 7 is the single biggest update since the initial release and it just keeps on getting better.

I develop RW7 on an iMac 5k with 2 external monitors. This is a shot of my desktop from a few days back.

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Cool, I’ll look forward to that.

Initially I thought it was due to CMS images being pulled in but I have been trying to master BWD’s Sections Pro so have been studying the demo project a lot recently. Going from page to page can take up to 30 seconds in the demo and there is no CMS data or large images but a lot of stacks on each page. I’m not saying this is a Sections Pro problem but I do see the biggest delays in the demo project.

@jspencer2 I’ve been able to replicate the slowness you’re seeing using the Sections Pro demo project! I’ll have a chat to Simon about this but my initial findings are that it’s a Stacks/Sections Pro problem. Are there any other plugins or stacks you’ve seen the problem with?

Thanks, @tpbradley, I appreciate your comment. My suspicion was a result of the reflection on the fact that so many users of RW are having so many varied difficulties with running your software, while others seem to have no problems at all. That made me think that RW must not get in conflict with anything else that is used on the same computer. Or, is it always something wrong that the user does? One way or the other, for many users, running RW is like swimming up the river…

@1611mac I’ve looked through our support queue and because you haven’t registered an actual name in this forum or sent in a request from the registered address, I don’t know which issue is yours to follow up on (just in case it got lost along the way).

Please change your id here (you don’t have to change your username, but actual information that we can look up elsewhere would be in your best interest support-wise)

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I am using Sections Pro on some pages and it’s slow but I only started using it recently and it was slow before that. Although I now use Foundation for all my projects I first experienced this problem with third party themes from Brandon Lee about 18 months ago and sent in project files to be profiled. Various reasons were given for this slowness but the cause was basically attributed elsewhere and I was told it may improve in the future.

In the meanwhile I have struggled along with endless spinning ball and slow page previews for more than a year. No mention was made that Rapidweaver was not making use of multicore processors so I hope we can soon see an upgrade that fixes this speed issue properly. Having to wait anywhere from 15-30 seconds every time you select or try to preview a page is a huge delay on productivity.

@Rovertek It’s a reasonable assumption, one of the real challenges anyone has writing software is that every system is different in some way. Even if 2 identical machines are set up the same, subtle things like user names could be different and possibly cause problems.

We have access to some data on RW’s usage and while a number of people do have problems, the vast majority of users are using RW without any problems. It may seem like a lot of people have problems because happy users rarely ever contact us or post on the forums.

Guys, I completely sympathise with you on slowness, I can’t stand software that slows me down. We’re trying really really hard to fix any performance problems in RW and using multiple cores will help. However, based on my findings last night the multicore support will most likely have little to no impact on the Sections Pro performance problem. I will be having a chat to Dan and Simon about this and get in touch with the plugin developers to see what can be done.

@ashleykaryl Can you send a recent copy of your project to us? The more projects we have to test with the more likely we’ll fix the problems :wink:

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There is no Sections Pro performance problem. There is a RapidWeaver performance problem that is most noticeable when using complex project files. The demo file referred to, is a demonstration file showing many configurations of what is quite probably the most sophisticated set of stacks available.

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Sure I’ll be happy to send in a couple of project files but echo what Gary has said. I don’t think this is a problem with any specific stack and Section Pro can perform tasks that would normally require 3-4 stacks. Recently I tried Blocs and everything worked instantly. FTP also worked perfectly.

Hello,… concerning support. First of al… thank you for your interest!

I have submitted several issues to support and I’m not having much luck getting any help. It takes days to get a response. Then I’m asked a question, (like “Can you use Export Site”) and I answer and I hear nothing back for days… You can PM me here if you want details. I’ve even asked @dan to help. I have provided some sample files on a blog export issue. I emailed my response and links to sample files back to support days ago. I hear nothing…