Just been trying the demo for version 8 and read somewhere here that its seem slower in certain aspects…I too have found this…loaded my site and the preview seemed to take ages to load
Count me in. The preview seems much slower on RW8, and even slower with a device preview open. As I mainly use Stacks pages, I think it’s related?
Definitely not directly related to Stacks. I’ve had no slow down in Preview. Perhaps it’s even faster with RW8. I’m sure something is causing the issue, but it certainly is not as simple as Stacks in general. Perhaps there is a specific stack that is creating the problem. Or something completely different.
I had high hopes for version 8 to be faster than 7.
What I noticed is that the speed is just about the same, if not a bit slower. However, this is related to my pages being saturated with a lot of content and quite a few stacks and partials. Simple pages with fewer elements open up and preview much faster.
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I have experienced them to be about the same. I was also hoping for improvements in preview speed.
I have been spending a lot of time lately on speed of preview/publishing. I actually thought RW8 was slower at first too. I have done side by side comparisons between 7 & 8 and the times are pretty identical. What was it? It was my own fault this time. I have some new unreleased stacks that I have been making for my new website (launching soon). These stacks were quite complex and it was definitely their fault. I have been chatting with @isaiah about performance and I know that he is making things faster on his side as well. I got preview times for this new stack down from almost 10-20sec to almost instant. Pretty crazy right?!?
What does this mean for you right now?
Its tough to say without seeing your project file. Obviously, the more stacks that you have on the page, the slower the export will be. There are a lot of factors inside each stack that will also make one stack faster than another. Pay attention to pages that may be slower than others to preview or publish. Do those slower pages have a particular stack in common? Isaiah and I would love to hear your findings.
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My opinion: it’s very difficult to tell. I think there are differences, but I think they are small enough as to be very difficult to notice without measuring directly with developer tools – or at least with a good stopwatch.
I just had a user this morning tell me they were certain RW8 was “much slower” and sent their whole project. After finally doing a detailed measurement I found that the difference was ~20 seconds in a very long export of a very large site. I suspect with different hardware and under different load the discrepancy could have been half or double – in other words: 20 seconds is well within the margin of noise of the test.
That said, as I told the user this morning before measuring exactly, I think it’s worth investigation. I suspect there are some things that may in fact be significant.
But keep this in mind: if your site is largely Stacks based, then most of the time consuming parts of the export will be inside the Stacks code base. That hasn’t changed. It works exactly the same in RapidWeaver 6 all the way through RapidWeaver 8. The only differences are cosmetic. All that code, running on the same hardware, is bound to run close to the same speed (there are some differences with how the different apps thread their code – but these will be very difficult to detect).
So here’s what I’d love to see:
- Grab a nice big fat RapidWeaver 7 project and a stop-watch.
- Open it.
- Hit Start on the stopwatch.
- Export it to a folder.
- Hit Stop.
Write the number down.
Now do the same with RapidWeaver 8.
Repeat.
If you’ve got some significant discrepancy and it’s fairly repeatable, send me the project. You’ll need to also send me your whole add ons directory too. If you want to, you can jump over to the Stacks Slack channel: http://slack.yourhead.com and I’ll open it up, do the same test and – after a bit of digging – I’ll let you know why.
If you find something good we can fix it in Stacks or I’ll package the bug-report up nicely and send it to the Realmac guys if we need to.
Happy bug hunting!
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The Preview is very slow for me too. I do not use stacks. My project file is 166MB in size. Once the preview initially loads, it takes less time to preview another page but still longer than RW7.
Simulate is slow compared to Preview in version 7. It is faster to preview in Safari so, for me, this hyped addition is unusable and feels like a backward step.
if anyone would like help addressing these issues (doesn’t even have to be a Stacks thing) then the offer still stands. 
no one has taken me up, or even posted a measurement. 
c’mon forum folks, i know there’s at least one person that can spare a couple minutes to get to the bottom of this. if we work together i bet we can solve it!
isaiah
3 different pages in same RW8 project (I have deleted the 2.99Gb of files associated with RW7):
Page 1
Simulate MacBook Pro 15"
8.8s
Preview Page in Safari
6.1s
Page 2
Simulate MacBook Pro 15"
15.7s
Preview Page in Safari
6.9s
Page 2
Simulate MacBook Pro 15"
7.1s
Preview Page in Safari
5.0s
Total of 32s with Simulate compared to 18s previewing in Safari
While my issue is certainly a ‘speed’ problem, it has nothing to do with export time ‘to a localized file’. Taking your challenge however, I exported my rather large project file (localized file export) within RW7 at 1m:40s. The same file within RW8 was 1m:27s. Using this metric, RW8 is slightly faster.
Using an extremely large (heavy laden photo’s) page within the same RW8 project file (after app restart), I have also noticed that it took 41 seconds for the edit mode to show the page contents. It took another 1m:20s for the rendering of the same page when placed in page view mode. The times will of course will be less once it caches on subsequent page views. Going from this mode to the new ‘simulate’ mode completely failed, showing a white window (after 5 minutes I closed this window). The simulate window does work for other pages with less page load.
This has been sent to @dan a few days ago. I just wanted to chime in with other metrics. I love RW8, but some issues haven’t changed since RW7 and some new functionality appears problematic when handling very large project files. Certainly any new app is going to have growing pains and some old issues may not necessarily have viable fixes. Just FYI since you threw the challenge out there.
MacPro 5,1
6-core 3.33
48 Gb ram
4 SSD’s
High Sierra O/S
RW8
Stacks3
@isaiah has offered to apply his expertise and dig into this deeper but will need project file(s) along with the time results. If there’s a bug within RW8 that’s going to help get it resolved faster.
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@Phi - These are interesting numbers. I would expect these things to be close. Or at least clos-ER. I’ve not experienced a noticeable difference in my own projects.
But this is not an apples-to-apples comparison – these two preview mechanisms are quite different in a lot of ways – and comparing one thing right after the other might involve some caching – so it’s very difficult to know how much to read into it – but it’s definitely worth investigation to see if the discrepancy is from an expected difference like caching or if it’s some type of bug. I’d encourage you to share your project with myself or Realmac – who can dig in with debugging tools to find out. 
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Very interesting to see this - I have experienced speed issues for a long time with the later versions of RW7, possible due to Off Canvas menus which seemed to slow down exports. RW8 has been a breath of fresh air in speed terms. No numbers, but everything is finally working as I would expect. Delighted.
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Having got the upgrade to RW8 on first use I hit an issue. I’m using Foundry CSV table and when trying to link to the file in resources it gave a ‘crash’ message as well as not showing any of the names in the resource drop down menu. So I’m sticking to using RW7 (which has a similar issue with the same CSV Foundry, only showing the first 5 or so resources, crash message but still works). On the issue of speed it does seem slower but as I’m not going to use, or can’t due to the CSV table issue, I’ll be sticking with RW7 despite having paid for the upgrade! Had similar issues when RW7 came out and was somewhat reluctant to upgrade but as it leaves your RW7 file and creates a copy as least that’s a saving factor, rather than having a new file that has stopped one for using it. Overall not impressed as yet until the bugs are sorted out.
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