Robohelp scalability and speed

Question

I am encountering scalability/speed issues with a 4000 file
Robohelp 6 project. This has 2000 HTML files and 2000 images.
This appears to be the result of Robohelp performing a number
of background file scanning/parsing threads that prevent the user
interface refreshing in a timely manner. The problem is most acute
at start up when it checks every HTML file in the project - the
user interface only becomes responsive after about 90 seconds.
There are also problems at other times particularly after saving a
file that has multiple hyperlinks. At the current authoring rate I
am adding about 1000 HTML files per year. Will Robohelp be usable
in 12 months from now?
As a test I created an artificial project containing 10,000
empty HTML files and it was totally unusable. Does Robohelp 7 have
the same scalability and speed issues?

Answer 1

This has happened before for me too - I just recreated the
folders, imported the topics back into them, and all was well. This
happened after a CPD rebuild as well.
I considered it a good thing - I am convinced that CPD bloat
and the attempt to reconcile file and folder locations was slowing
down the program significantly. The CPD just needed to be rebuilt.
Of course, I have a large project, and it took a few hours to get
back to running speed, but yours is about twice the size, so you
will be down for awhile.
If I were you, I wouldn't necessarily consider returning to
the backed up dataset right away. You'll be back to the same
performance issues. In your shoes, I would suck it up - just
rebuild what needs to be rebuilt, and move on. And keep an eye on
your CPD file size occasionally. I find that if the file size
increases significantly all of a sudden, it's probably time to
rebuild it.
You may want to consider Peter's suggestion (reminiscence?)
of breaking up your project into usable chunks and merging them.
That's my two cents, take it for what it's worth.