performance questions

HelpXplain is the exciting new animated infographics and screencast tool that integrates with Help+Manual.

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Bob Brink
Posts: 12
Joined: Tue Feb 27, 2018 1:32 pm

performance questions

Unread post by Bob Brink »

Hi,

I know this is tough to quantify, really just looking for general feedback before I dive in...

I am looking at making some more complicated screen-casts, perhaps with 50 slides, each 1024 x 768. As a general rule, is this considered big enough to cause possible performance issues?

If I add 10 or 20 seconds of audio per slide, will that have major impact on performance? I imagine audio is WAY bigger than images, is audio loaded all at once or as needed? Is it best to limit audio?

I could run some tests on the web server. Would the test be "decent" if I duplicate first slide with 15 seconds of audio 49 times? I ask because I read in forum that you were doing (or were going to do?) some re-use of duplicated assets.

Is there a way to look at published project size on desktop and determine if this is small medium or large enough to raise concern?

Maybe someone share experience by looking at their biggest projects and tell me, it's X MB on local hard drive and works good on our (typical or fast) web server?

Thanks and HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Bob
Bob Brink
Posts: 12
Joined: Tue Feb 27, 2018 1:32 pm

Re: performance questions

Unread post by Bob Brink »

replying to myself...

I went ahead and ran some tests on what I would call a "medium" speed server. I no longer have any concerns regarding project size, even with addition of reasonably sized audio files.

Kudos to the developers,

Bob
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Tim Green
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Joined: Mon Jun 24, 2002 9:11 am
Location: Bruehl, Germany
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Re: performance questions

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Bob,

Thanks for the questions and the feedback! I would say that around 50 slides is pretty close to the maximum you should put on a single page. You need to remember that each "Xplain" is really a single web page with ALL the assets that are displayed in the course of the presentation. So in addition to the server performance you have to consider what the user's browser is going to be able to handle efficiently.

There are several factors that will increase performance:

First and foremost, keep your graphics sizes to a minimum, because those add up really quickly. HelpXplain will automatically resize images on export on the basis of your viewport size definition for the project so that they are not larger than necessary, but you may be able to make them smaller if you keep them within the viewport size limitations yourself. Using shadows creates a significant performance hit because of the way browsers must calculate them, and turning them off is always one of the best ways to boost performance. Audio clips also add to the page size, of course, and will affect page loading times.

If you need more slides, it's best to create more than one Xplain and daisy-chain them with a click action in the last slide of each one to open the next one.
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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