High core-count and Multi-thread Support

I understand that Storyline is multithreaded. It is however it is only 32bit (but is large address aware) so can only access 4gb of RAM. SSDs will improve performance.

I realize I am resurrecting a 1 year old thread, but has there been any progress with any of these areas?

• 64-bit version
• multi-core processor and multi-threading support
• usage of more than 4 gb RAM

I do not see any feature or discussion newer than this.  My company is planning to invest in some new computers for using Storyline 360 and I am concerned that we will not see much performance improvement if these features have not been added.

Where are things?

Hi Sam,

I'll leave recommendations on specs and hardware to others in the community (our minimums are detailed here) but I did want to let you know I shared your feedback and this discussion with our team. I know a bunch of folks have asked about a 64-bit version to help with overall performance and to take advantage of their powerful machines. 

This feature hasn't reached the top of our roadmap yet, but we're still listening to the feedback!  Here's a bit more about how we work to prioritize feature requests.

Once we have more details to share, we'll post here to keep you in the loop! 

It's not just large files with videos that cause slowdowns.  Sometimes, even in the simplest of projects, you'll get slowdowns.

Sometimes, I see it after doing a lot of copying and pasting in a project.

And do this.  Create a brand new project of just one slide.  Bring in a new image.  Resize the image to take just a portion of the slide.  Give it the picture effect of soft edges with, say, 7 pixels.  Copy and paste this image now.  After 6-8 copies are made, note how slower and slower Storyline becomes for that slide.  Click on a copied image and it'll take a few seconds before it gets focus.

Granted this may be an extreme example but I've had complex slides with many images with soft edges coming and going and this always slows things down immensely when editing.  So, for now, no more soft edges for anything.  (Articulate was looking at that specifically a while back.  No improvements yet, unfortunately.)

Now I have a pretty powerful Windows 10 Pro PC with dual SSDs (one SSD M.2 drive for my OS and apps, one "regular" SSD for saving project work, and one regular HD for archiving), an Intel i9 processor, a good dedicated NVidia graphics card with 11 gig of RAM (I run dual 4K monitors), and 64-gig of RAM.

When I got that rig a year ago, I didn't notice a huge speed increase over my previous system with SL.  A slight improvement here and there but not the "bang for the buck" that I was hoping for.  This may be the old proverbial after a while throwing better and hardware at something has a littler effect after a certain point.  Not sure what the optimal hardware setting is from that.

I've found that what is running at the same time as Storyline sometimes has an effect.  Not sure why.  So I try to only run the minimal number of apps at one time when working on a SL project.

I've found certain anti-virus/malware programs can have an effect on speed.  From the old days of early anti-virus programs, (and no one doing the job completely), I run two anti-virus/malware programs, which I really shouldn't do now (old habits just die hard sometimes :) ).  For Storyline work, I shut one down (Webroot) and just have Norton 360 running.  Big speed increase.

Through trial and error, I've found that whenever a SL360 project goes over using 1000 MB of memory in the Windows Task Manager, "strange" things and slowdowns may start to happen.  So sometimes I'll monitor Task Manager when working on a big project or doing a lot of copying/pasting and when I see memory usage approach or go over 1000 MB, I'll save my work, close out of everything, and reboot.  Yes, that takes time but is a lot less frustrating than possibly losing work.

I don't know if 1000 MB is the magical mark for everyone and or it varies from system to system.  Beyond my pay grade. :)

The good news here is I can attest to the fact that Articulate takes this all very seriously and have a number of avenues to pursue.  One of their people spoke at our local user group a couple of weeks ago.  I had a side conversation with him after and among the many things we discussed, this was one.  He mentioned, in very general terms, a few things they may be/are looking at (unfortunately, as a SL360 beta tester, I'm bound by NDA and cannot say more).

Suffice to say I came away from that part of the conversation feeling really hopeful by all this.  Knock on wood.

I believe porting the software to 64-bit and to allow use of more than 4GB of RAM may go someway to helping with performance, but also allow you to make use of the resources your system has available to it. Having 16GB or 32GB of high-speed RAM won't make much of a difference if the software can only use 4GB total.

I also think that although a piece of software can be multi-threaded that still doesn't guarantee it will support processors with more than 4 or 8 threads. Ryzen Threadrippers ran into this problem in the first generation where despite their high-core counts, some applications weren't making use of the CPU resources despite supporting processors with multi-threading.

Time will tell, but I thought it was something worth asking to see if there was any hardware options that could improve performance, but this seems to be more of an optimisation perspective,

Good to hear from others surrounding this. 

Also resurrecting this thread.  Articulate, please post an update.

$25,000 question! If I save a file in the 64-bit version, will I be able to open it again in the old 32-bit version?

I am super happy to hear this!!!  64-bit multithreading is going to make large courses much easier to work with.  Thank you for listening to the community and making this important improvement to the software.  Thank you.