DTPro chokes on large RTFs

Hi all. Using the latest public beta of DTP 2.x. I do a lot of web-based research that involves creating or clipping large amounts of text into RTF files. It seems that once the size of the file gets around >600kb though, DT slows down, a lot, while I’m reading it; scrolling gets very choppy and unresponsive, etc. I’m running a MacBook with up-to-date Leopard and have 2gb of ram… is it me or is it DTP? Anything I can do to improve performance in this regard? Thanks.

EDIT: my workflow here is usually to save the page I’m looking at as HTML, import it, then convert to RTF. I am constrained to do either that or save as .DOC or PDF by the search software I’m using.

Are you consolidating clippings into large RTF files? If so, and they hit 600 KB file size, you are running into memory issues. 2 GB RAM is no longer the huge amount it used to seem to be. However, I just sent off my ModBook with 4 GB RAM for a free hardware upgrade, so I’m working at the moment on my old MacBook Pro with 2 GB RAM. At the moment, I’ve got 4 databases open, one of them a large one. I just opened a text document, Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man, which runs to 1.8 MB. No slowdown at all.

Database slowdown indicates that you are heavily using Apple’s Virtual Memory, which swaps data back and forth between RAM and disk when there’s no longer enough free RAM. Read/writes to disk are orders of magnitude slower than read/writes to RAM.

If things bog down, try quitting DEVONthink, closing any other memory-intensive applications, then relaunching DEVONthink. Restarting the computer will clear the disk swap files and speed things up. Note: people who have a lot of active Widgets may be surprised if they examine how much RAM they can consume.

I would recommend that you instead store smaller files, stored in groups of related files.

That will not only allow fast loading of the files. You will also get much better performance from searches and from See Also requests.

If at the end of a project you need to merge a number of files into a single large text document, just put them into the proper order, select all the files to be merged and choose Data > Merge. A new consolidated document will be produced.