Articulate 360 VERY VERY SLOW

i did the update today, so i think it will be the latest build....
And nothing changed, very slow performance, crashes etc...

Thanks for confirming that detail, Andreas!

Because your setup sounds great and you're on the latest update, this is an excellent opportunity for our Support team to lend a hand. They're troubleshooting wizards, and will scan your diagnostic logs to track down what's causing these issues!

I opened a case on your behalf, so keep an eye out for an email from the team soon. I'll also follow along to share any relevant insight here!

Any chance that you are using the soft edges effect around the images?  Sometimes that can really slow things down on a slide.  Known issue that Articulate was working on at one time.

I had a slide in an old course prototype with 16 images on it with soft edges.  Slide was very slow.  Click on an image and it took 3-7 seconds before the image even got focus.

Remove all the soft edges from the images--instant speedup.

Thank you Gerry for your help, but i don´t use any picture effects in storyline 360, doing all the graphics in Photoshop, only sometimes shadows on some png-files.

But i saved the complete file under a new name, opened this new file and the performance is a little bit better.  

I can work on my courses for a while (have to save very often - which alone is very slow) but after a while storyline gets slower and slower.
So i have to quit storyline 360, start it again, open the course and can work for another 30 minutes.

And sometimes i have to reboot to get back to work again.
For me it looks like a memory-issue in storyline.

And Storyline 360 crashes very often (sometimes when i try to save the file, very often on clicking the preview-button, sometimes by exporting the course).

I am working with quite huge courses (medical education) with many pictures, audios, animations and some videos. But i am doing this now for more than 4 years with occasional problems. But now the problems are worse than ever....

Yeah, huge courses, along with very complex slides, can sometimes be an issue.  Yes, it seems to be severe memory "challenges."

I've found that often when working on a course, and the Windows Task Manager says Storyline is taking over 1000 MB in memory on my system, that weird things start happening, and the app often really slows down.  Should I see memory cross that threshold, I always save, quit and re-start SL or, more often, save, quit, and reboot the PC.

Doing a lot of cutting and pasting and duplicating of slides or objects also seems to elevate memory issues sometimes.

I have a somewhat powerful Windows 10 PC (i9 processor with 64 GIG of RAM with two SSDs and one traditional HD) so I run two anti-malware programs (a holdover from the "old days" when antivirus programs were not as complete in coverage and companies didn't share virus information). Running two of those programs at once is usually a no-no.  But I always close one down (Webroot) when doing an SL project and get a speed bump for that.

I used to sometimes do fairly complex slides with everything on the base layers but lately, I've been doing things like that more in layers and that helps a tad, though I always worry about exact timings of things with that.

Maybe SL is long overdue to have a 64-bit version, though I've also seen both pros and cons for that and it may not always be the "miracle cure" that people think it is.  I don't know--I'm not a software engineer.  ;)

The other thing that I've seen is having a lot of pictures with many states can sometimes slow things down.  I have an old course, where on one layer, I have six of the SL characters, each with two or three states each.  The layer is brutally slow to edit.  Click on a character and it takes 5-10 seconds before it even gets focus.  Remove the states from the characters and another instant speedup.

Same here. It runs very slow and then I have to wait 20 minutes for it to save. I have deadlines. This is not acceptable.

Hi Andreas! So sorry for all the trouble you're seeing. Were you able to follow the steps in the article Amlan sent you?

Storyline 360: How to Fix Unexpected or Erratic Behavior

Rachel, that article 👆should help you, too! If you're still seeing sluggish behavior after following those steps, reach out to our Support team here. 

Hi Alyssa, i followed your instructions (which i di a few times before) an everything is a little bit faster. 
But after a short test Storyline 360 crashed in preview-mode and i had to kill the task.
I had no time to make a longtime test but i will tell you my impressions...

Thanks for your help....

Just wanted to jump in. I'm building a pretty big course and all of a sudden hit the slowdown others have described in this thread. I did everything discussed (uninstall/install 360, cleared temp files etc.) but it was still really slow. I even imported the slide I was working on to a new project, but same problems.

And then I removed the contrast I had placed on a photo. Instant change. I'm now running at a normal speed. I'll be adjusting the contrast of my photos in Photoshop for the time being. Hopefully this can help others until an update comes through.

Hi Mike,

Thanks for jumping in and sharing this helpful tip!

We've also suggested temporarily hiding images using the "eye" icon in the timeline while working on the current slide. This should help to speed things up as well.