large file compilation speed increase version 7?

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Silas Tomkyn Combermache
Posts: 11
Joined: Sat Aug 15, 2009 11:42 pm

large file compilation speed increase version 7?

Unread post by Silas Tomkyn Combermache »

I have version six and I am tempted to upgrade but I have seen no discussion of any speed improvements, especially for large chm files. I have experienced non-linear increase in compile times for large files. I never have any other application running when I do this and I have found that task manager reveals that Help and Manual does not use the available 8 cores (3.4G i7) or memory (16G). The memory use never goes above 13% and four cores have no activity at all. Has the situation changed with version 7? Can you suggest any settings that can improve large file performance? I can supply file size and compile times if you want them but roughly a four times increase in chm size results in a compile time more than one hundred times longer.
Oh, a replay of the upgrade discount would be appreciated. :D :D

thanks,
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Tim Green
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Re: large file compilation speed increase version 7?

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Silas,

I can understand your need for this but the Microsoft CHM compiler has not been updated or even bugfixed since it was originally released with Windows 98. It is a single-threaded program and that is unlikely to ever change. That part of the process at least cannot be improved. Help & Manual also works on the compile process in a single thread for a number of technical reasons -- in many cases the topics do actually need to be processed in sequence.

Publishing speed in version 7 may have improved slightly but it will not be subjectively much faster. There are two ways you can improve this, both external to Help & Manual itself: The biggest speed increase can be gained by replacing spinning hard drives with a fast, reliable SSD, like one from the Samsung 850 Pro series. This is particularly important for publishing HM projects because the entire process is very disk-intensive. The other thing you can do is use a faster processor, because rending topics from XML to the various output formats and calculating all the other components is also processor-intensive.

In addition to this, you should also avoid doing anything over a network. Compiling from or to a network drive will significantly slow down everythingl, even over a fast gigabit connection. It is much, much faster to have everything stored locally on a fast SSD and to do all your publishing there as well.
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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