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NWE = RAM HOG

Posted: 2005-09-10 02:14:15
by Spiros
I'm using the 2.5 version and it consistently uses 60-70 MB of RAM.

Does anyone else have this problem?

The betas never had this problem and I'm at a loss to figure out why. It doesn't matter if I'm using just Nisus or if I have other programs open, NWE always keeps 60-70 MBs for itself, even if I'm doing nothing, Activity Monitor shows 60-70MB. Since I only have 256 RAM, 60-70 just for Nisus is too much. I'm currently playing with Mellel and it has never passed 25MB.

I'm running on 10.3.9 if that helps.

Nisus people? Anyone else?

Posted: 2005-09-10 03:55:08
by MikeKazlow
NW 2.5 is using 76 MB on my machine 10.4.2 without doing a thing. OTOH, I never believe MS or Apple on what a minimum system should be 256 MB wasn't adequate under OS 9, no less OS X. That said 76 MB for a WP that has done nothing but launch is a bit much. However, it doesn't use the CPU when not in use, which is a good thing.

Mike

Posted: 2005-09-10 06:27:07
by Tacitus
MikeKazlow wrote:NW 2.5 is using 76 MB on my machine 10.4.2 without doing a thing. OTOH, I never believe MS or Apple on what a minimum system should be 256 MB wasn't adequate under OS 9, no less OS X. That said 76 MB for a WP that has done nothing but launch is a bit much. However, it doesn't use the CPU when not in use, which is a good thing.
Mike
I've noticed that it uses a lot of Ram. However it seems to use most when opening and doing formatting in the background and then settles down to something more respectable - around 30Mb. It seems to do a lot in the background with large docs; they open and are on-screen but then a lot of work goes on behind the scenes before you can do any meaningful scrolling.

I suspect this is a programmers trick to make us think it is faster than it is. It is the only program that has *really* made me think of getting a new machine - Im still on a G4/400 although I have 756Mb Ram which should help.

cheers,

Tacitus

RAM Hog?

Posted: 2005-09-10 19:24:09
by dshan
Well when I open a 9,000 word doc in NWX 2.5 I see it's using about 55MB RAM (and 222MB virtual) which is comparable to other OS X apps -- Firefox is using 63MB and Thunderbird is using 37MB. Really, 55-70MB is nothing nowadays, I don't have Word or Office to test but I'll bet it uses considerably more than that. Heck even Appleworks with one small doc open is using 22 MB real and 418MB virtual. Pages is using 39MB real and 183MB virtual with no windows open!

Posted: 2005-09-11 19:27:22
by crumb
I'm working on a 70,000 word manuscript, and here's what I've found

The old version, (2.1.1) NWE uses about 69 M when open. 2.5 uses about 61 M when open. In comparison, Firefox is using about 35 and iTunes about 37. Personally, I think this is pretty darn reasonable, and I think taking a chunk of memory upfront to increase runtime performance is a pretty smart design decision.

Unfortunately, I'm stuck on 2.1.1 because of one tiny, but critical (at leastl to me) bug. 2.5 only gives me a character count on my document. It doesn't give me a word / paragraph count. Sigh.

Posted: 2005-09-11 20:17:43
by midwinter
crumb wrote:Unfortunately, I'm stuck on 2.1.1 because of one tiny, but critical (at leastl to me) bug. 2.5 only gives me a character count on my document. It doesn't give me a word / paragraph count. Sigh.
That's really strange. Word count works for me.

Posted: 2005-09-11 22:40:51
by MacSailor
midwinter wrote:
crumb wrote:Unfortunately, I'm stuck on 2.1.1 because of one tiny, but critical (at leastl to me) bug. 2.5 only gives me a character count on my document. It doesn't give me a word / paragraph count. Sigh.
That's really strange. Word count works for me.

Same here, it works for me too.

Posted: 2005-09-11 22:42:14
by Ryan
midwinter wrote:
crumb wrote:Unfortunately, I'm stuck on 2.1.1 because of one tiny, but critical (at leastl to me) bug. 2.5 only gives me a character count on my document. It doesn't give me a word / paragraph count. Sigh.
That's really strange. Word count works for me.
Works swimmingly here. You're talking about the one in the tool drawer? Does it just stay blank, or what?

Posted: 2005-09-12 11:51:54
by crumb
Yeah, the character count works fine on the whole (unselected) document, but word and paragraph count just display a hyphen

If I select part parts of the document, word and paragraph count work for the selected area, but it doesn't work for the whole document. If I try to select the entire document, it stops working. It's pretty weird.

As I said, it's a big document -- 70,000 words accoring to NWE 2.1.1

Posted: 2005-09-12 11:59:36
by midwinter
crumb wrote:As I said, it's a big document -- 70,000 words accoring to NWE 2.1.1
I think the implication is pretty clearly that one ought not put that many words in a row.

Jeez. You people.

;)

Posted: 2005-09-12 21:07:24
by Ryan
midwinter wrote:I think the implication is pretty clearly that one ought not put that many words in a row
.

Jeez. You people.

;)[/quote]

Well, duh. I mean, how much does one document need, anyway?

But seriously, I just (somewhat artificially) made a document with well over 100,000 words, by copying and pasting a sizable document repeatedly. The word count kept up-to-date throughout. I was actually fairly impressed by its speed.

Is it only with this document? Do you have any other 70,000 word documents lying around that you could try?

Posted: 2005-09-12 21:47:10
by midwinter
Ryan wrote:Do you have any other 70,000 word documents lying around that you could try?
You know, I thought I saw one under the couch the other day, but I can't be sure. If you need one, I could probably dig up a 70K word document somewhere, so long as you don't care whether or not the words are, you know, actually good ones.

;)

Posted: 2005-09-13 00:55:13
by dshan
crumb wrote:Yeah, the character count works fine on the whole (unselected) document, but word and paragraph count just display a hyphen

If I select part parts of the document, word and paragraph count work for the selected area, but it doesn't work for the whole document. If I try to select the entire document, it stops working. It's pretty weird.

As I said, it's a big document -- 70,000 words accoring to NWE 2.1.1
It sounds like it has to be something unusual about that particular document, wordcount is apparently working fine for others (works fine for me also). Does it use tables, multiple columns, unusual styles, or something else out of the ordinary? Weird fonts or footnotes perhaps? Was it originally created in NWX 2.1.1 or did it come across from Word or some other application? Does wordcount work for other documents of yours?

If you can't find out what's tripping up the wordcount facility you should probably send it to Nisus support and see if they can figure out what the problem is.

Posted: 2005-09-13 06:16:06
by crumb
dshan wrote:
It sounds like it has to be something unusual about that particular document, wordcount is apparently working fine for others (works fine for me also). Does it use tables, multiple columns, unusual styles, or something else out of the ordinary? Weird fonts or footnotes perhaps? Was it originally created in NWX 2.1.1 or did it come across from Word or some other application? Does wordcount work for other documents of yours?

If you can't find out what's tripping up the wordcount facility you should probably send it to Nisus support and see if they can figure out what the problem is.
Nope. No tables, nothing fancy... However, I'll often write ~1000 word segments in OpenOffice on a windows box, save it as rtf, email it to my mac, open it in NWE, apply my font, and paste it into my manuscript.

I also commonly get the "multiple lines that overwrite each other" in this document. NWE (2.1.1 not 2.5) will occasionally "not wrap" my lines and just keep putting line after line on top of each other. If I cursor above the mangled lines, and do a hard return, it magically fixes itself. Go figure.