Reposting this request as I was out of town for a month and my original thread was closed.
The theme and stacks that I use require me to add files to folders in my resources area of RW. In RW 7 this was easy and very quick. Now about 99 out of 100 times when I add files, even as small as 4kb, the entire app freezes and I have to force quit it. Even when it does work it typically takes up to 5 minutes for the pinwheel of death to go away. I have contacted Realmac about this a couple of times with no response. Does anyone have any ideas? I have the latest versions of all my plugins.
I am running a iMac with a 4GHz i7 chip with 8GB memory. Running MacOS 10.15.3.
I desperately need help, my business depends on me being able to update my website every day and I have gotten zero response from m requests for support from Realmac.
What theme and stacks require you to use “resources?” I run a website with store, downloads, reports, custom search, and more and I don’t use “resources” at all.
The stack that I am using is ProGallery 2 by stacks4stacks. It requires the user to put the photos in a folder in the resources area. You also put a .csv file where you can add photo metadata. The stack refers to both of these and creates the photo gallery. It has been working perfectly for a couple of years now, except when I updated to RW8 back in December.
I just tried this simple test and it worked with no problem. Could the problem be that I have too many files in my resources folder? There’s several hundred full res photos with associated thumbnails in there.
Check all of your plug-ins and make sure they are up-to-date. Check for updates on your stacks.
Create a new project, open the old project and drag and drop a page from the old project to the new. Does the issue persist? It may be a corrupt project file. You may get by with re-adding your files to resources in the new project and dragging your pages over. I’d do a few at a time.
This issue started happening when I upgraded from RW 7 to 8. All of my add ons are updated as is MacOS. Backups are already disabled.
By the way, once I get this problem solved, is there any way to change the resources to show as a list, like in the previous versions of RW. It is EXTREMELY annoying to find that I spend a rather large upgrade fee to make things less productive.
I just spent the last couple of days rebuilding my site. I was able to load everything into my resources with no problem, but after publishing once, I am back to RW crashing when I try to add anything else into my resources section. Any thoughts?
since it seems to involve resources, my guess would be that it has something to do with a resource that’s in your project or perhaps the number of items that you’ve imported.
but this (and most of the other posts here so far) have been pretty generic guesses about fixing common macOS problems. i think some more detailed and specific info about the problems, the project, and the specific resources might be a good place to start to diagnose the problem rather than just taking more guesses.
i know this is a lot of questions – i know it’s a pain, but i suspect the more info that you give the folks here on the forum, the more answers you’ll get in return. it’s a time investment – so grab a cup of coffee and just type away for 30 minutes.
let’s start with:
are there any error messages that pop up?
can you post a screenshot or copy them verbatim.
are there any crash reports?
copy and paste the first few screenfuls of that here and it might help a bit.
can you describe the project a bit?
how large is it (in MB), how many pages, how many images? other types of resources – you mentioned a CSV file and a photo gallery – how many galleries and how many pages?
do you know the last resource you added before things went crazy?
when you use the word “resource” – you are referring to an item in the RapidWeaver Resources Window? If not – can you describe what you mean by resource?
if you delete that resource does anything change? if you delete ALL the resources (on a copy of the file obviously) does the speed improve?
There are four issues I’ve personally seen crop up with RapidWeaver Resources (things in the Resources Window). I’ll just throw these out there to see if anything looks familiar:
large PDF “images”
PDF is, at least according to macOS, an image format. however most people use it as a way to store and transmit important documents now. as an image format it can act as a sort of container of images – holding a lot of different image types. but they’re often VERY large, VERY slow to convert to other formats, etc.
if you’re using PDF images, stop. convert them to JPEG or PNG before importing to RW.
corrupted files
for whatever reason, image files suffer from corruption a lot more than other files – perhaps because they’re often being transferred from cheap thumb-drives or over old cables. sometimes a half-mangled image will get imported – but then cause all sorts of problems when it’s resized, previewed, etc.
if you notice things get really strange after importing a specific image – put it to the side, try to open it in an image app first – even just the built-in Preview app that comes with macOS. save the file using that app, then re-import, and see if things improve.
huge images
this one kind of speaks for itself. if you import a bunch of images that are large then it can really place an extra burden on RW and Stacks. images for the web should be as small as they possibly can and still have acceptable quality. never pull images right from your phone – iPhones native images are vast now. crop/compress/etc – chop them down any way you can. it will make RW run faster and your site load faster too.
warehoused images
many people warehouse images with the specific idea of improving performance of RW/Stacks – but are surprised to find that it often makes some parts of RW run very very slowly. the problem comes in Stacks Edit Mode. if these warehoused images are being pulled from the internet over a slow connection – or the images are large – or there are a whole lot of them on the page at the same time, then RW/Stacks has to download all those images.
if you’re warehousing a lot of images – see if (temporarily on a copy of your project file) removing them from the page helps. if it does, then perhaps look for alternate warehouse stacks that perform better, stop warehouse images, or simply use Site Images – which don’t suffer from that problem since they keep a locally cached preview.
OK – that’s a lot of info. Let’s hear some of those details from you – and then maybe we can make a more in-depth diagnosis of the issues at hand.
Thanks for the ideas. I don’t use PDF’s or warehoused images. I DO use full resolution images, and a lot of them. I probably have something like 2000 images on my site. My project file for my site is about 15GB. I am in the middle of resizing all of my photos and re-adding them to see if that helps things.
The problem started when I upgraded to RW 8. I had no trouble whatsoever for years until that time. In fact about 1 in 10 times my resource folder won’t even open. There are no crash reports as RW just goes into beachball mode. I have left it like that for days. The only fix is to force quit.
I would suggest you try a clean install on your OS. The beachball is often caused by underlying issues in your OS. I know it takes time, but it’s usually worth the effort. Just make a solid backup of your data, erase your harddrive, and start fresh. Don’t transfer back network settings and such. Redo all of it from scratch. Again, I know it takes time and is a pain, however, in most cases, it eliminates the entire beachball thing. Just a thought.
An OS install probably can’t hurt but will take a bit of time.
I’m just paying attention to your project file being 15 Gb. OMG!!! That’s huge. What do you do if you ever need to do a complete republish? Do you take advantage of RW’s built in backup option with a project that big?
I have no idea what initiated your problem, but I’d be very wary of a project that big. It just seems to be inviting problems. Making the images smaller in size will help. As a general guideline you want images to be about 300k. (This is only a very general guideline and there are definitely exceptions.) How big are your images right now?
Just as important can be how many images you have on a page. 20 300k images will be a lot larger and more taxing than 1 1 Mb image. So that’s important too.
In general I would suggest that you move towards using remote images: that is, putting your images on your server yourself, then providing URL links to your images in RW. With so many images I am assuming you are probably using a gallery stack on many/some pages. Most of the gallery stacks have an option to read images from a remote (i.e. your server) location. What this means is you don’t need to link each image, but you just need to link to a folder of images. So you could have 50 images in one folder.
Whether the images and how you are implementing them are the cause of your problem or not: I don’t know. But the end result is your project file will be a LOT smaller and swifter and more nimble.
