InDesign slow opening mega-linked doc over network and printing

[sierak13]

First post so be gentle......

Currently we have a graphic development center in Texas that is using Photoshop Creative Suite 2 Version 9.0.2. They are creating .eps and .tif files. Our publishing group is in New Jersey using InDesign Creative Suite 2 Version 4.0.4. The .indd and associated linked files are on the Texas server. All files are opened on the remote server, scratch disks and other temp files live over the network link in the Texas server.

So as you guessed the files open very slowly, typically our .indd’s are 6 to 10 meg with 150 to 300 links. The eps and tif files are 140 K to 16 meg max. So opening the files is around 3 minutes. We then create a postscript file so we can pump the output to Adobe Distiller 7.0 and this postscript process is between 7 and 10 minutes. Very stressful in crunch time.

Our alternative is packaging the files up and this has its own set of issues.

My question has been asked before, but what can be done to assist in improving the speed of operations? We have tested moving just the .indd files over to the hard drive or a local New Jersey server and now the files crash due to link errors and time outs. Average ping test on a 32 byte file is 47 ms from Texas to New Jersey. So slow but not that slow.

Local .indd work in Texas accessing the same server locations is 17 seconds to open and 30 second to create a postscript file. Ping is 5 ms. So if you do the math, it still should not take 10 minutes to spool up a postscript over the net.

Any ideas would be great things like pointing the virtual scratch disk locally, or a good content management process to copy/mirror art to another server but do not loose control of the version. Thanks in advance.

 

[Eggles]

I can't really help but I DO know from experience that opening ID files with multiple links on another server always takes a long time. Even if in the same office!! much less across a country.

 

[jcape]

I think this might be more of a network problem than InDesign. Something similar happened to me and this is what cleared it up. Check the settings for your network adapter. There is a property under the advanced settings for "Link Speed & Duplex" if this value is not set correctly it will really slow things down.




Good Luck.

 

[sierak13]

Thanks for the tip…never thought of the adaptor settings could be causing this….love this place!
Some of the other items I am reviewing are:

• Anti-virus interference
• Synchronization of clocks
• Relocating and mirroring the linked files to a local NJ server.
• Internal settings with CS2 InDesign to see if we can move the scratch disk local.
• Looking at a content management (check in/check out) process for handling remote graphics development. This way the server can live anywhere.
So if you folks have any suggestions on content management or mirroring graphics libraries that would also help. Like most companies we have our crunch time, and we can not wait 24 hours for some chron to run and update the mirror. I need a dynamic exception update process, so once it is saved it is mirrored as well.

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

 

[jmgalvin]

My suggestion would be to run a test. Take one small project - probably a test project only, or redo of a completed project - where everything is stored locally at the final prep site. I would assume that would be where indd resides. Then compare time savings.

Since you're printing pdf, it seems wasteful to have all this back and forth with indd other than for basic backup purposes. Make the pdf from indd locally and send that to wherever your press is.

Unless you require pure grayscale pdfs, you might bypass the postscript stage and export the pdf directly from indd. The "press setting" in indd is the same as in distiller and it can be easily customized (although distiller does offr a few more options - rarely necessary ones). You can also "print" pdfs on the indd machines if the users have acrobat. Again, that will give you the option of your various Distiller settings.

I'm guessing that the postscript generation for distilling is a holdover from using Quark previously.

If you can knock off the pdfs in Jersey and send those to your press folks, you'd knock off a lot of network time.

If you consider such a move, I would recommend a thorough test.





Using OSX 10.3.9 on a G4

 

[sierak13]

Well looks like we are going into mini-project mode, getting 250GB of space in NJ and will be attempting some senerios, working on the use cases now... Boy I wish there was someone that has done this before...anyone know really big users of InDesign and Photoshop...maybe even international...would love to pick there brains.