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Any way to speed Realm Works up?

M

mrjane

Member
I have found this software to be incredibly slow to use. Opening a new tab takes 7-8 seconds each time. Everything seems to move in slow motion or stall at strange times. Does anyone else have these kinds of issues? I have a beast of a PC and everything else runs like smooth jazz, so I don't know why this program is such a bother.

Is there any way to speed it up? Or something I might be doing wrong?
 
How many tabs do you have open? More tabs means slower performance.

Have you been importing data? If so, then you could try using the database options to copmress the database - it will shrink the database file quite a bit.
 
A few. 3-4. The speed never changes, whether it's one tab or 5. And this is in a fresh new realm with nothing imported.
 
mrjane said:
A few. 3-4. The speed never changes, whether it's one tab or 5. And this is in a fresh new realm with nothing imported.
Click to expand...

It's one database for all realms, though. A fresh, new realm doesn't mean a fresh, new database. Do you have other realms with imported data?
 
The 64-bit stuff Rob was mentioning in the latest update may be the last best hope....err, sorry....Channeling some Babylon 5 there.

Seriously, the 64 bit architecture will definitely allow more memory to be used. I'd be shocked if other optimizations weren't already on the to-do list as well but there's always that whole prioritization thing.
 
If you're not up for stealing the previous version of Realm Works and traveling back in time a thousands years, oops Babylon 5 again. The things to always try when performance is tanking, make sure RW is installed on an SSD, compress the database if you've ever imported anything into any realm at any time, rebuild the index (a long shot in this case but it is a maintenance operation you can perform yourself) and finally uninstall and reinstall RW. If none of that works you're in the same boat we're all in hoping that 64 bit RW improves performance in the way we hope it does. Allowing the program to use all available memory rather than just 2GB should make things much better.
 
An important thing to note.

Opening tabs and changing tabs is quite system intensive. The way it works is the act of opening or changing tabs reads everything in that 'view' into memory. So if you have a view that contains everything then everything gets read in. Try and create some custom views with topics limited to just what you need for your session. This can help quite a bit.
 
Problem for me is that I have multiple computers - would be nice to copy the preferences / tab settings. Probably possible with some effort by copying some settings - I never tried though.
 
The problem is the views are stored in a non human readable format. There is a preferences.xml file in %appdata%LWD Technology, Inc/Realm Works but it doesn't have anything about tabs or views. I strongly suspect the data is in the multiple directories with the Unique ID names in that same directory but good looking figuring that out.
 
IIRC, almost all state is stored in the master.realm file, not in preferences.xml or the other folders in your Realm Works folder. The subfolders contain the index data used for searching and linking, one per realm.

It's been a while since I poked around the internals, but you can see where some of these things are by opening (a copy of) your master.realm file in a text or hex editor and searching it. It won't help you copy it, though. (Once upon a time I'd intended to add some info about your realms to my helper application, but very little is available in any reasonable fashion. :(
 
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The subfolders are definitely not one per realm. I only have 6 and have a couple dozen realms. Even the ones I open regularly are more than those 6.
 
How many have you opened since the last time you compressed or restored the database, deleted the preferences, or otherwise done app-wide maintenance operations?

As a test I deleted everything in the folder except the master.realm file and started opening realms; now I have exactly one subfolder per opened realm.

Rebuilding the index of a realm deletes exactly one folder from your subfolders and makes a new one with the same name (the names are the realm GUIDs, IIRC).

I don't know how other realm operations might affect it (notably import/export, as I haven't done any of that in ages) but in general it's one per realm.
 
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I compressed the DB and still had the same six folders. I tried opening a realm I haven't done anything with in years and did get a new folder. I rebuilt the index and got the same thing you report. However I hadn't done anything with the DB or rebuilding any indexes in a long time. So I'm confused why I only had six. I have my main fantasy realm, I have the community realm, My Expanse based realm, My solar system atlas realm (started out as the Expanse realm but I realized an atlas of the solar system could be generally useful so I'm building it for export), and test realms for each of the game systems so that when people report problems I can test out the issues and try to help. That's 9 that get opened regularly.
 
Hmm...then I don't know. The copy of the folder I made before going on this journey has one per realm I have plus one, which I think was for a realm I'd deleted. None of this really matters; as we've both said, there's no human-useful information here and it's all implementation detail.

I did get it to crash a bunch on a realm where I'm a player. Guess it didn't like me deleting the index. :)
 
I think this has been a problem since the beginning. I brought it up a long time ago because my style was to prep some but wing it and it was not feasible to use RW at the table to take notes. I ended up writing notes down and putting them into RW later.

The best I could glean back then was that RW was intended for prep work and then clicking when things were revealed to players. Using these things for session notes, in terms of what was revealed and when. Not for taking notes or entering data during play. That's fine! It just didn't help me with my own style of running a game.

I'm hoping that the 64 bit upgrade will allow more memory, I also have decent PCs, and that will speed things up.
 
The 64bit upgrade will definitely allow more memory to be used. 64 bit programs can use essentially unlimited amounts of memory, its actually 16 exabytes but when a system comes out that has even 1 exabyte of RAM then we can start worrying about that.
 
daplunk said:
An important thing to note.

Opening tabs and changing tabs is quite system intensive. The way it works is the act of opening or changing tabs reads everything in that 'view' into memory. So if you have a view that contains everything then everything gets read in. Try and create some custom views with topics limited to just what you need for your session. This can help quite a bit.
Click to expand...

Holy crap Batman! It would probably help quite a bit if that behavior of the software were changed. There must be a better way to do it. I think it is good that there is now a setting that lets you tell it not to search your entire realm for text links every time you save anything, and more things like that should probably be considered for future refinements.

I haven't personally run into many bugs in Realm Works (one big one though), so the single biggest regular usage hassle for me is the lag.
 
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daplunk said:
An important thing to note.

Opening tabs and changing tabs is quite system intensive. The way it works is the act of opening or changing tabs reads everything in that 'view' into memory. So if you have a view that contains everything then everything gets read in. Try and create some custom views with topics limited to just what you need for your session. This can help quite a bit.
Click to expand...

It should only need to read the titles of topics, not "everything", in order to create the list of topics.
 
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