Forum Discussion

OrvinCastanha's avatar
OrvinCastanha
Community Member
12 days ago

Serious Lag and Memory Buildup in Long Storyline360 Course – Suspected Media Unloading Issue

Hi Everyone,

I’ve been facing a persistent and performance-impacting issue in a complex Storyline 360 project and would appreciate guidance or confirmation from the community.

Problem Summary

I’ve created a long interactive course with multiple topics and rich media (images, audio, video) across slides and layers. As users progress through the course, the application begins to lag severely, especially after the midpoint.

After extensive testing, I found a major memory buildup during runtime:

  • Initial Memory Usage: ~55 MB
  • Final Memory Usage (after all topics): ~4 GB (!)

The course doesn’t use heavy JavaScript, tracking, or data storage that could account for such memory growth.

 What I’ve Tried

  •  Restarted my PC before testing.
  •  Closed all background applications.
  •  Monitored memory via Task Manager after each slide/topic.
  •  Used optimised MP3 audio and JPG images where possible.
  •  Avoided continuous background audio or video.

Despite these measures, the lag remains, and worsens in the last quarter of the course, suggesting something is accumulating as the user progresses.

Hypothesis

My working theory is that Storyline is not unloading media (especially images/audio) from previous slides. This leads to:

  • Memory bloat from unused assets.
  • Laggy transitions and interaction delays in later slides.

I also noticed this issue gets worse if:

  • I use many layers on a slide.
  • There are large audio clips or embedded videos.
  • I attempt to preload media early using triggers (which I’ve stopped doing).

 Project Structure

  • Single .story file combining multiple topics.
  • 30+ content-heavy slides with images, layered interactions, and voiceovers.

 What I Need Help With

  • Is this a known limitation in Storyline?
  • Does Storyline 360 retain media in memory from all visited slides?
  • Any way to force memory to clear between slides or scenes?

Any suggestions from the community would be greatly appreciated!

 

Thank you in advance.

Mahesh Mahajan

Articulate 360
e-learning development
storyline 360

1 Reply

  • EricSantos's avatar
    EricSantos
    Staff
    11 days ago

    Hi OrvinCastanha,

    Sorry to hear about the trouble you're experiencing! I appreciate the detailed description and the troubleshooting you've already tried.

    We don't have any known issues related to what you're seeing. Regarding media retention, Storyline 360 does manage media across slides, but optimizing your media assets can help reduce the load and improve performance. Unfortunately, there isn't a direct way to force memory to clear between slides or scenes, but optimizing media and updating your software can mitigate these issues.

    Since you're already using optimized media in your course, we can start by checking if you're working on your local drive. Working on a network drive can cause erratic behavior. If the problem still happens, try running these steps to fix installation issues and update Storyline. 

    We'd be glad to investigate further if the issue persists. You may share the affected Storyline project here or privately in a support case, where our Support Engineers will work with you one-on-one. We'll delete it when we're done testing.

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