High core-count and Multi-thread Support

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.