Two instances of HM publishing WebHelp simultaneously

[Miriam Levy]

Hi,

If I open two instances of the program and attempt to publish WebHelp in both of them at the same time, one of the instances hangs and never completes the publishing task, while using up one processor core.

To face this problem, I tried the following:

-download and install the trial version
-Copy the folder "\Documents\My HelpAndManual Projects\Examples\HelpAndManual7" to two different locations, lets say "Documents\Test1" and "Documents\Test2"
-With each program instance, open one of the Documents\TestX\helpman.hmxp projects
-In both program instances, select Publish->WebHelp and set a different output directory for each instance
-Press the Publish button in both instances quickly so as the two projects are built almost in parallel.
-Wait and see

One of the instances completes the publishing task successfully and opens the WebHelp with the default browser, while the other instance freezes at "Generating Full-text Search Index" .

Is this a bug, a project-related issue, or a program limitation?

Thanks

[Martin Wynne]

Hi Miriam,

That's what comes of using the Windows virtual folders, such as the "Documents library". Almost certainly your two instances are trying to access the same output folder.

I never go near the virtual folders with a bargepole, and always create my own folders for my stuff.

Try creating:

C:\MY_STUFF\HM_TEST1\
C:\MY_STUFF\HM_TEST2\

and put your two instances in there.

regards,

Martin.

[Miriam Levy]

Hi Martin,

Thank you for your reply.

Neither the output folders nor the project folders are virtual, they are real, physical independent folders.

To be precise, my output folders are set to:
"C:\Users\Miriam\Desktop\EC Software WWW\EC-SOFTWARE\Test1\help\index.html"
and
"C:\Users\Miriam\Desktop\EC Software WWW\EC-SOFTWARE\Test2\help\index.html"

My project folders are:
C:\Users\Miriam\Desktop\test HM\HelpAndManual7
and
C:\Users\Miriam\Desktop\test HM\HelpAndManual7_2

My OS is Windows 7 Professional x64

[Martin Wynne]

Hi Miriam,

I'm sorry if my reply sounded a bit short.

Are your Documents folders synchronised to any backup scheme or cloud storage? The two instances of H&M will likely be producing temporary files having the same names, which may be confusing such synchronising programs. The full text search functions operate on the output folders, not the original XML sources, so two instances might easily get muddled. The Zoom indexer is multi-threaded, which may also be causing problems if two instances run together. In the full version of Zoom there is an option to control the number of threads, but I don't think that setting is available in the bundled H&M version.

regards,

Martin.

[Tim Green]

Hi Miriam,

As you've discovered, Help & Manual itself has no problem running in multiple instances. The problem you ran into was generating the search index, which is performed by a separate program. My guess is that this program may have problems running in multiple instances at the same time. I'm not entirely sure about this, so I'm going to check it with our developers. I'll get back to you on this when I have more information.