Hey All,
Is anyone one seeing the dreaded spinning beachball when saving, placing an image or other like tasks? I am seeing them regularly in the last few updates. I am current on updates for RW and Mac OS.
My machine is a 3.1GHz i7 with 16 GB of ram so should handle the app fine. I don’t see beachballs in any other app but RW.
Anyone else seeing them? Thanks.
Blessings,
–Mark
Getting exactly the same here garageshop. Lots of heart stopping moments.
Running RW 6.3.1 (15010) on Yosemite. So incredibly slow.
Everything else on my Mac is running fine.
You may want to disable Quick Look preview generation in the RW Preferences. Does your project use any built-in plugins, or just third-party ones such as Stacks?
—N
@nikf – I tried to find Quick Look preview enabler in Preferences. I did not find it. Where exactly should I look?
Oops… Never mind, I just got a notification about the new version, which has that option in Preferences…
Didn’t see any real difference turning off that option. 95% of all my sites are stack sites and there can be dozens of individual stacks on a page.
Thanks.
Blessings,
–Mark
I tried turning off Enable Quick Look Generation too and it makes no difference whatsoever. Sometimes even the smallest of saves i.e. amending a spelling mistake sometimes takes 20 to 30 seconds for the beachball to stop spinning. At other times the save (or whatever I’m doing is as near as damn it instant.
Any other ideas anyone?
Cheers,
Mike
This is actually the issue I’ve been having
(I mentioned it on another forum from someone having other RW6 issues).
This is it exactly. Spinning beachballs. Updated on both machines. Something seems to have changed overnight because I noticed it on my mobile machine (new mbp) so switched to my more reliable older desktop and had the same issues there too. Copying. Pasting. Saving. Switching between pages etc. Each accompanied by at least 30 seconds of spinning beachball.
I pulled up my activity monitor and on every beachballing action, Rapidweaver crashes and the CPU usage maxes out. Then it calms down again.
Such a relief to know it’s not just me.
If you’re seeing these issues with built-in plugins, please let us know. It’s more complicated with the likes of Stacks - you may want to contact @isaiah (after Stacks 3 Public Beta has wrapped up - http://community.realmacsoftware.com/t/stacks-3-public-beta/1336/9) to see if there’s any tweaks you can make to improve this.
@tj87 A few questions:
Do you see beachballs on brand new files with only one Stacks page? Or just on specific files? If it’s just on specific files, can you send our support folks a copy of the file (and the stacks it uses) – that will help us find/fix this bug.
Have you tried this project in Stacks 3? Performance is improved significantly for some sites that rely heavily on global templates (like Joe Workman Foundation sites).
If RW does eventually crash (stop running suddenly by itself) and present a crash window, it may help to send the contents of the crash window along with your files to our support folks.
Upgraded to S3 yesterday (BRILLIANT upgrade BTW) and not a spinning beachball anywhere on my machine this afternoon! Fabulous!
Blessings,
–Mark
@garageshop - Thanks for reporting back your results! Glad to hear that it’s improved. Performance (both of Stacks itself and of the pages it generates) was one of our core driving principles for the Stacks 3 upgrade. Several large architectural changes to the way Stacks works at its very core were made in order to improve the performance you see in Edit mode.
Hearing about results like yours means that all those long hours paid off! Good news indeed!
Isaiah
Stacks 3 is TRANSFORMATIONAL for RapidWeaver. I remember thinking when RW6 first came out, then a Stacks update made even scrolling my stacks nigh on impossible, that it was basically ‘Game Over’ for me with RW and Stacks.
RW6 with Stacks 3 is ridiculously fast. I can scroll through hundreds of stacks in about a second and interacting with those stacks is just effortless. I cannot find the words to praise @Isaiah enough… Stacks 3 is an essential purchase for ALL Rapidweaver users…you simply HAVE to get it and try it - you will never be able to go back and your web site producing life will be SO much better. S3 is just off the scale.
Currently using Rapidweaver 6.3.3 on a new 4k iMac with 32mb ram. Noticed before I went on holiday on 18th August when I was using the then latest version of Rapidweaver that I had started to get the spinning ball. Did nothing about it as I thought I would see how things were when Stacks 3 arrived which it did whilst I was away. Now have Stacks 3. Moving around my sites and grabbing stacks and blocks of text has become so much slower waiting for the spinning ball to go. Not experiencing this problem with any other Mac program. Previous to August I used to fly around my sites making amendments.
Richard
Hi Richard,
Would love to see your site. It is quite rare to hear that things got slower in Stacks 3 than in Stacks 2 – ok, being perfectly honest, you are the very first to report this 
I would guess that it is something very specific to the content of your file and the stacks that you have installed. I would very much like to have a look at them and see if there are things that we can do to improve things.
It would be great to see both your stacks folder and your RapidWeaver file – if you have a copy of the file from before Stacks 3 so that we could compare apples-to-apples and measure the exact differences with performance tools that would be very helpful in solving this mystery.
You can, of course, always send things like this to our support email support@yourhead.com, but you can also reach me directly by visiting our slack board: http://slack.yourhead.com and sending me a direct message – you can zip up your file and and your stacks folder and drop them right in the slack window and it will send over the files even if they’re hundreds of megabytes.
Isaiah
Hi Isaiah,
Thank you for your concern about my problem I will be in touch with you directly regarding the files you mention. Just doing some experiments first with the smallest of my sites.
Richard
I may be on the track of solving this. Using a 1 year old 4k iMac with screen set to default. Attached to it is is a large older Apple screen. When I move the Rapidweaver window over to the second screen which is set to 1920 x 1200 resolution I can move around much quicker with I think as yet no spinning balls. I have not noticed this problem with any other application using the iMac
Richard
Since I never got a copy of this document after the emergency 4am wakeup call and deletion (LOL – that will make a good story over beers later) – I’m just going to take a wile guess at what might be the cause based solely on “large document” and “primarily a problem on retina display”.
One problem I’ve seen a lot is that people have many retina resolution images on the page in image-warehousing type stacks. Since warehoused images are online, each of these large images must be downloaded each time the page is rendered – they will be cached, but only a few – if you have many images and many pages the cache quickly gets used up.
Downloading large images over the internet is slow. That’s all there is to it. There is no way of speeding this up short of calling your internet provider and sending them lots of extra $$$.
A couple recent documents I’ve seen where warehousing dozens of images – (at several resolutions for responsive behavior) – and needed to download all of them to render the edit mode display. This takes a really really long time (tech detail: WebKit only renders on the main thread – so the UI is hung while it does its work – this means if the render takes more than a couple seconds the Mac shows the beachball).
The solution is a tradeoff: stop warehousing images on pages like this. This will mean the document will open more slowly (since it will contain those images), but the upside is that those images will be on your local machine while you’re working and stacks can load them direct from memory, which vastly more efficient and much faster.
If you are warehousing images on this page, then I think trying out local images on a test document might be worth the time it takes to experiment. If it yields no substantial results we can look elsewhere.
Thanks Isaiah for all your suggestions. I feel sure it is the retina display that is causing the problem so probably will now have my Rapidweaver projects open on the second screen. Not guilty regarding the warehoused images. I use hundreds of warehouses images but they are all on separate pages built with Dreamweaver and using the MagicZoom app. Links to these on the Rapidweaver pages are just thumbnails. The only unexplainable part of this scenario is that it only started to occur somewhere about July/August 2015. At my age I also sometimes have to get up at 4.00am.
Richard
The problem is not being caused by the 5k iMac screen. My Rapidweaver windows and now open on an older lower resolution screen. Whenever you click a stack and try to do something with it like creating a link the dreaded beachball starts. Uploading is fine but clicking the Done button after it is offer causes the spinning. So every operation is taking quite a while to execute. This problem was there before Stacks 3 and reading some other posts I am guessing it is caused by the versions of Rapidweaver that were introduced somewhere about early July. I would like to know if other users are having a similar experience. A small site I have is working perfectly but my larger sites all in the region of 250mb are suffering.
