delventhalz

Q: Huge lag in Pages when editing documents with many elements

So I've been using Pages since it came out, and have found the workflow to generally generally pretty fantastic for layout work, so I've used it to design a number of posters and the like. More recently I've begun designing board game material in Pages, which has had me creating documents with literally hundreds of elements, shapes, lines, text boxes, etc. They are simple elements, and the file sizes of the documents are small, but I've found that Pages seems to quickly get bogged down simply by so number of elements, resulting in is a huge lag time between initiating an edit and seeing the result (well over a second).

 

At first I thought this had to do with my aging iMac, but I recently upgraded to a brand new 3.5 GHz i7, with 16GB RAM, and a Fusion drive. Every element of this computer should be speedy enough to handle this sort of work without delay, but yet the problem persists. Is this just a flaw in the way Pages was coded? Is there a fix?

Posted on Jun 27, 2014 2:33 PM

Close

Q: Huge lag in Pages when editing documents with many elements

  • All replies
  • Helpful answers

  • by PeterBreis0807,Solvedanswer

    PeterBreis0807 PeterBreis0807 Jun 27, 2014 4:58 PM in response to delventhalz
    Level 8 (35,551 points)
    Mac OS X
    Jun 27, 2014 4:58 PM in response to delventhalz

    The problem is with Pages 5, which I am assuming you are using, but haven't said.

     

    Try using Pages '09 instead.

     

    Peter

  • by delventhalz,

    delventhalz delventhalz Jun 27, 2014 8:22 PM in response to PeterBreis0807
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Jun 27, 2014 8:22 PM in response to PeterBreis0807

    Thanks for the reply Peter. I am currently using Pages 5, though with the last big project I was on Pages '09 on my old iMac. At the time the lag was very problematic. The newest project is 5-only, but I've opened the old project in both '09 and 5, and there is some lag, but not much. Seems to be the same in both '09 and 5.

     

    This is actually a little surprising since the old project is some 50 pages long, and the new one is just one, though they may have a comparable number of elements, I wouldn't expect the one pager to have more, but yet the lag on that one makes it practically uneditable. Would the fact that the old project was created in '09 make it more responsive regardless of whether it was opened in '09 or 5?

  • by delventhalz,

    delventhalz delventhalz Jun 27, 2014 10:13 PM in response to PeterBreis0807
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Jun 27, 2014 10:13 PM in response to PeterBreis0807

    Created two new documents to try and test the theory properly, one in Pages '09 and one in Pages 5, with identical elements (623 in all). And yeah. Woah. Not even close, Pages 5 tanks. Pages '09 isn't exactly a speed demon either, but it is plenty usable even with so many things on the screen.

     

    Here are the speeds tests, all run with a 3.5 GHz quad-core i7, 16GB RAM, Fusion drive:

     

    Dragging one element

    Pages '09: 0-1 seconds (time is erratic, sometimes instant, sometimes a short delay)

    Pages 5: 11 seconds

     

    Copying and Pasting one element

    Pages '09: 0-1 seconds

    Pages 5: 11 seconds

     

    Undo one element

    Pages '09: no delay

    Pages 5: 4 seconds

     

    Dragging 623 elements

    Pages '09: 1 second (tough to say, movement was jerky, but delay was short)

    Pages 5: 16 seconds

     

    Copying and Pasting 623 elements

    Pages '09: 23 seconds

    Pages 5: 27 seconds

     

    Undo 623 elements

    Pages '09: no delay

    Pages 5: 5 seconds

     

    Both Pages '09 and Pages 5 appear to be single-threaded by the way, as both consumed 100% of one CPU core when working on a task. However the time taken was pretty dramatically different. Other than copying and pasting the entire document, Pages '09 did every task in a jerky but reasonably amount of time. Pages 5 was essentially unusable, especially when dragging a single element. That is such a common task, and it has to be fast.

     

    This is really disappointing. I'd finally made peace with the new UI, and it looks like under the hood is just a mess. Guess I'm back to working in '09 again. And the document I was working on that began all this, I'm going to have to start over from scratch, some five hours of work lost. Not happy Apple.