Large Project File Performance Issues
Sep 30, 2014
We use Articulate Storyline to create Web Based Training materials. We have been experiencing some performance issues with bigger project files.
For example, one of my projects is over 2GB. It has 37 scenes and 640 screens. Whenever I open a slide in one of the scenes, edit it, and then try to go back to the Story view, I wait for a minimum of 1 minute before the Story view responds again and I can click on a scene or slide. Then if I start scrolling horizontally to get to the other scenes, Storyline slows down and quits responding again. After 3 minutes or so, Storyline starts responding again, allowing me to select a scene or open one of the slides. However, by this time, in scenes with at least 50 slides, slide icons within the scenes start flashing. I can still clicking on a flashing slide and open it (after a few minutes of delay), but sometimes Articulate quits responding all together and crashes. In addition, when all are well, it takes about 5 minutes or longer to save the project each time.
Are they known issues for larger Storyline projects? What do you recommend we do to improve the performance of larger Articulate Storyline project files?
In our department, we each have Storyline installed on our PCs. My system is:
Windows 7 Enterprise
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM)i7-3770 CPU @3.40GHz
Installed memory (RAM) 16.0 GB
System type : 64-bit Operating System
Free Memory on C drive: 210GB free of 465GB
Thank you.
5 Replies
Hi Masami and welcome to Heroes!
I'm sorry to hear about the slow performance with your .story files, and although it sounds like that is a large course and that you have a good set up in terms of overall memory - I haven't heard of a definitive file size for Storyline courses. What I would suggest is to ensure you're working on the .story file alone, and close down other programs or applications that could be eating into the memory allocated. Additionally, I've heard users say that saving and then reopening Storyline, or even ensuring that their computer is rebooted daily has helped with slow performance issues.
Lastly, if Storyline continues to crash and cause difficulties as you described, we're happy to take a look at the error logs that are being generated as described here.
Is there a way to break a very large project into pieces? That is, can you start one lesson from within another?
Hi Ken,
I'm not sure I understand your question - if you had a project that you needed to split into smaller chunks, you could look at importing out the individual slides that you'd like to use into a new project.
Sorry. I mean can you link Storyline lessons together more or less seamlessly from the user's point of view.
If instead of one 2-gig project, I make four 500-meg projects (Lesson Part 1, Lesson Part 2, etc.), could I send the user to Lesson Part 2 when she gets to the end of Lesson Part 1?
The main reason I ask is because of video. Even with good compression, a very video-heavy project gets really big really fast and load times (among other things) can become an issue.
Hi Ken,
I have heard of a few users who have published individual .story files (starting from the last one) and uploaded to a web server so that you could then go and insert a link to it within the next one. So for example, if you have four sections - you publish section four first, and place it on a web server - and then grab the link to that one and place it at the end of section three on a slide and publish that version, place on a web server, and so on.
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