My prototype of a portal site has about 15 pages, most with dynamic panels with about 5 states and each panel several large widgets, mostly tables or text areas. The generated prototype is VERY slow to load or switch pages, though state switches within a page are quite snappy. The prototype directory has 4905 files of which 3907 are png images (all generated in 30 seconds ... amazing). It appears that the browser is not caching any of the images, so even later-than-first loads of pages are very slow.

 I know "it's a prototype" but it would be nice for demo audiences to see faster page loads. Is there anything I can do to speed things up?

Thanks.

That's interesting... I've been experiencing the same thing, but Axure prototypes used to be very, very quick, so I attributed it to my recent switch to Mac and running XP on Parallels. Assuming you're not doing the same thing, then maybe there is something going on with the prototype code.

The size of the files that need to be downloaded increase with the use of dynamic panels. If a panel has 5 states and they are very large panels, it could be equivalent of downloading 5 pages at one time. The prototypes download all of the states when the page is loaded which is why the initial load may be slower, but the switching from panel state to panel state is very fast.

We are looking into ways to reduce the size of the HTML and javascript that needs to be downloaded and possibly improve the caching.

One thing that may help if you have a lot of images or some very large images is to right-click on them and Edit Image->Optimize Image. That can reduce the size of the image files.

As for the many files in the prototype directory, the files are not removed when a new prototype is generated to that folder so you may have some old image files in there that are no longer being used for that prototype. You can delete the prototype folder and regenerate to clean it up. Those folders are not cleaned out with each prototype generation in case users are keeping other files in the prototype folders.

Hi,

we are working on a prototype with about 120 pages, but nearly without any dynamic panels/features, but a lot of standard form widgets, tabs etc. The HTML prototype is located on a network drive and its performance is so slow that the developers "refuse" to navigate through it. The only way to resolve this problem is to ZIP the prototype and run it on a locale drive, not really convenient. Does anybody faced already the same problem and is there any work around (beside rendering the prototype file as help-file) and/or are there plans for "code tuning" in a coming release?

Cheers

Michael
 

I encountered the thing a while ago - the network drives where I work seemed incapable of serving the prototype at any acceptable speed (a typical page to anything between 10-30 seconds to load).

I cured the problem by serving the HTML from a web server instead. Over HTTP, the speed increased to the same as that of accessing them from my local drive. I now have a little PC sitting next to me from which I serve all my prototypes, and the devs just have bookmarks to it. I find there are other advantages to this as well because now I can use rsync to copy over the prototypes - something that wasn't possible on the network drives due to some obscure permissions configuration.

Talking of which, it would be cool to have an option to run a script before or after generating a prototype (eg, a random bit of VB to copy it to a drive, send a notification email, update a date stamp etc.). Nice little features that make working in teams easier is what makes things like Eclipse and VSS so cool. But we can't have everything I suppose.

 

 

Serving the pages via http:// does help very, very much - on a Mac you may consider using MAMP http://www.mamp.info/de/mamp.html as a superior solution to OS Xs built in apache. 

Hi,

thanks for the input, using a webserver instead runnig the HTML-prototyp from a network drive. Ich will try this.

Cheers

M.