Why Oh Why is it so slow ?
I have downloaded the latest version 1.94 without any problems. But the programme is still diabolically slow. It takes 2 secs after any button press to eve slightly resize a picture using the picture bar and 1+ sec to move to the next page. What am I doing wrong. I just can’t live with it.
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What is the spec of your PC/Mac? Does it meet Blurb’s minimum requirements? See the System Requirements in the FAQs if you are not sure. In particular with PCs the more memory the better the response I susoect Mac’s are the same). I have found that BookSmart is no different here to other memory intensive apps (such as Photoshop). I have 3Gb on my desktop. My laptop has just 1Gb but is newer and has a faster CPU but the desktop is now way way faster with BookSmart. When I started my book there was little difference, but as I imported more photos the desktop quickly grew to outpace the laptop. ........Tony
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Couldn’t agree more. It has taken me THREE hours to do just one album. Every single photo is taking several minutes to laod. I am using an iMac with Safari. Is there any way of speeding it up?
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I have an Intel Core 2 Duo processor at 2ghz with 2gb of Ram and masses of storage
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Most people’s computer needs can be satisfied by very general requirements. There are only a few specialized areas that if you go into, your computer will need muscle not required by common users. Photographic editing and publishing is one of them. Now most people deal with small things, like a single photo for instance. Blurb doesn’t qualify as such a simple operation. You are editing an entire book at once. Blurb must have drag and drop access to all the photos in your library at once. Even if they optimized everything by building a second cache of screen-sized images and thumbnails, you are dealing with a lot of memory. People are attributing this slowness to Booksmart. No, this is because you are doing something with your PC that you never meant to use your PC for (or you would have spent more money on key components). If you want to compare, insert all your photos into a word document-watch it and your PC crawl. You may thing Word will never respond at times. The main requirment in photogrpahic editing and publishing is memory—lots of it. When your computer runs out of memory it starts constantly swapping things in memory onto the hard drive to make room. It then swaps other things off the hard drive into the space it opens. Swapping kills performance, period. If you didn’t make sure you bought 7200RPM hard drives, then this will get painful fast. This is also where a defrag of your hard drive will make swapping as optimal as possible, but it will only help a little. Swapping means your PC is out of resources-it can’t do what you are asking. 1GB of memory is a bare minimum for this type of work. If you are using Vista that translates to 1.5->2gb because Vista is a behemoth. I’ve got 1gb on XP Pro, and I’m swapping and slowing down cause I’ve got 300 photos in the library of this book. I need 2Gb to work efficiently. Especially if I want to open Photoshop and do some edits simultaneously. Above 2Gb and you get into technical issues. Windows doesn’t address more than 2gb of memory unless it is confirgured with a IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE switch (yes even Vista 64-bit has this 2gb caveat). And only applications that are identified as capable of addressing the higher memory will be able to see and make use of it. Bottom line, don’t expect more than 2gb to do anything for you on the Windows side of the world. (don’t know how macs fair with 4gb) If you have a built in video chip, it also will make page renders slow onscreen. CPU—not so important here. If you are doing photoshop editing and applying filters, then your CPU counts. Oh, I take that back. CPU counts when you are publishing, since the pages get rendered in memory.
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Can you tell me whether the photos collected for the book are cached on their own or does my whole photo library get accessed every time ? I do a lot of photography and have a large number of photos but the book so far only has 6 photos and as yet no text.
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Hi ferdinand et al., I just spoke with a developer and here is the deal: image caches are generated the first time a book is opened in the new software—and only when the page that image is on is visited. So, scrolling through your book for the first time after upgrading can indeed take a while. However, those image caches are saved, so opening the book tomorrow in 1.9.4 should be significantly faster. I hope this helps! Best regards,
Jeremy
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Ferdinand, if you look in the BookSmartData folder (under My Documents), you’ll see folders for each of your projects. Inside each is a library folder. There is a file for every image you added to the project library, and then 3 more versions for different resolutions. This is where the software caches the original and other rendered versions of your photos. It NEVER reaches back and touches the original photo again. For the Developers, you’ve hard coded the path for BookSmartData improperly. I use the NTFS feature in Windows of mapping a folder to a separate drive. My \My Documents folder maps to F:\. Blurb is the only software that wrote their document directory to "C:\Documents & Settings\Username\My Documents\BookSmartData" instead of the virtualized location of "F:\BookSmartData", which appears to apps and the OS as the first standard location. No other program and I use many dozens, has done this. Blurb is using a call or ignoring a logical value and writing to the wrong physical location.
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HI royalef, I’ll gladly pass that along to our developers. First, can you confirm you’re talking about BookSmart 1.9.5? This version is supposed to allow the kind of flexibility you seek. If you’re writing about v1.9.4, you’re definitely right on. If that’s the case, please upgrade to v1.9.5 and that should address your concern. Or perhaps you’re making an educated critique of the new Directory feature in v1.9.5. If that’s the case, please let me know and I’ll make sure the developers read your note. Best regards,
Jeremy
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the whole thing is ridiculous and the going on and on about computer memory and size just makes me mad. the program is just too slow and they need to do something about it. with the last booksmart versions on a smaller, slower computer the program ran just fine. i just upgraded to a huge computer (dell precision t3400, 4gb, 800mhz, ddr2 ecc sdram memory with dual nVidia, quadro fx 570 256mb dual dvi graphics card) that should be able to handle any program. then i upgraded my booksmart and it is so slow it is painful to work on. i don’t know what they did with the latest version but something is terribly wrong. it has been slow for days of working on the same project…so the "it should run faster tomorrow" just isn’t so—it won’t. i finally finished my project…so i am only begging blurb to take this seriously because i want to use you again in the future. but i won’t if it doesn’t get better… so back to the origional question: why is BOOKSMART so slow! ! leah
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Jeffrey I am using 1.9.4, and I will update to 1.9.5 – although I would honestly be surprised if it changed it. For one, it would mean the upgrade would have to relocate all my files (1.6 gb of files) during the upgrade process. Otheriwse I would "appear" to have lost all my booksmart folders. Perhaps you are referring to the ability to manually change the storage location. I was actually referring to programmers incorrectly coding the default location. The NTFS mapping feature I use is very rare, even most IT people don’t realize you can do this. I am an IT person.
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Memory doesn’t help this sadly sloooow application. I use a Pro Mac Tower with 8 Gigs of Ram and I can’t edit the photos with out some serious drag time.
You guys have created a wonderful application but forgot the end user isn’t going to spend $1000 on ram to make it work. Back to the drawing board fellows.
Gurudog
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Howdy gurudog, I hear you. BookSmart is still a Java application, so anything it does must first pass through the Java Virtual Machine. As long as it’s a Java app, it will never be as fast as a native app. Please note that BookSmart works well enough on enough systems for authors to upload, collectively, thousands of books per week. So if it’s working that badly on your system, there may be something else going on here. Please run Software Update to ensure you’ve got the latest version of Java. Also, File Vault can give BookSmart some issues. If you want to give Customer Support a crack at improving BookSmart’s performance on your machine, please send them a message by cliching here and filling out the form. Best regards,
Jeremy
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