Dreamweaver CS 5 Runs Slow in Design View: Potential Issues and Fixes

Jason C. LevineDon't talk to me.
CERTIFIED EXPERT
Creating effective web sites since 1993
Published:
Adobe Dreamweaver CS5 is a WYSIWYG web page editor that has advanced HTML, CSS, and Javascript rendering functionality and is probably the most well-known HTML editor available.

Much of Dreamweaver's appeal centers around the Design View interface, which does a pretty good to very good job of rendering a page's CSS and HTML into a fair approximation of what the browser will display via the WebKit framework.  Unlike a typical preview, web page authors can continue to edit the page content in this mode and, depending on settings, see placeholder icons for line breaks, positioned elements, code snippets, and much more.

Some users complain that Design View reacts so slowly as to become almost unusable and report having keystrokes take between two and three seconds to reflect on the screen.  This can be due to one of several factors:

1) Due to the load of having to draw and redraw the layout and CSS styles as the author types content into Design View, Dreamweaver may become a little laggy.  This information comes from David Powers (author of several books on Dreamweaver and one of Adobe's Community Professionals) in a slightly acrimonious Adobe forum thread. According to Mr. Powers:
Rules that apply to the <html> or <body> tags or that affect more than 10 elements force Dreamweaver to repaint the page completely.
His solution is to make sure your CSS declarations are as tightly targeted as possible and use descendent selectors to tie elements into their parent containers.  This is certainly good practice but may come as a rude shock to users who upgrade to CS5 from CS4 and discover their pages are not as editable as they used to be.

2) Although the listed specs are fairly modest, in my experience Dreamweaver CS5 requires a fairly fast machine and graphics card as well as a decently fast hard drive and RAM.  If you are running on a slightly older machine any or all of the preceding could slow the program down.  

3) Using DW to edit pages on a shared network drive can really cause speed problems.  We have three designers on staff and to make life a little easier, we pointed all of their local Site Definitions to a folder on a shared drive.  The designers would complain intermittently that Design View would begin to lag throughout the work day.  After a lot of hair-pulling, teeth-gnashing, and heavy drinking we finally traced the problem to network congestion on the Network Attached Storage (NAS) that they were using.  If enough users hit the NAS, the constant redrawing caused by point #1 would eventually cause something of a bottleneck on that device and slow things down.

There are several possible solutions for #3.  In our case, we moved the web design team to a different, less utilized, NAS and that has restored most of the functionality.  A better solution would have been to enable Subversion integration (which is built into DW CS5) and have the designers use their local disks for editing.  However, Subversion is not the easiest thing to set up nor use in Dreamweaver and if you are not familiar with it already, you may be a bit confused as to the changes it will bring to your workflow.  For those of you in multi-developer environments who are willing to give it a go, please reference this DevNet article.

If you are having trouble with Dreamweaver CS5 and slow Design View response, I hope this article has helped you get things back on track.  If not, feel free to post a comment here, or a new question in the Dreamweaver Zone and I'll be happy to try to help you further.

Jason
2
9,397 Views
Jason C. LevineDon't talk to me.
CERTIFIED EXPERT
Creating effective web sites since 1993

Comments (4)

Commented:
I work in-house at a large corporation and we've never had any luck hosting local files on a share as far back as Macromedia DW3. Even on a dedicated file server, network performance has made it too slow and painful. Now that many of us are remote, the VPN layer makes it completely impossible.
Jason C. LevineDon't talk to me.
CERTIFIED EXPERT

Author

Commented:
Hi bastianr,

For us (30 people, 2 web devs at the time) we were fine on a local 100mbs network through CS4.  But a number of things changed from CS4 to CS5...

1. We doubled the web staff to four people and increased the main staff to 40 overall.  The main NAS was getting hammered.

2. We switched from POTS to VOIP and started to notice more network congestion at peak working hours since more of the staff was on the phone at the same time

3. Design View rendering really changed in CS5 and the current version is trying to do a lot more with the CSS.  Each time you type, the whole view redraws and if the file is remote, that refresh can lag you.

Those factors combined really made CS5 hellacious to use.   As above, we moved the web Dev team to their own NAS device which reduced the pressure on the NAS and returned DW to a working state.  If/when it slows down again we'll probably have to set up a subnet for web folks and allocate them some bandwidth of their own.

Commented:
Thanks, good info. At one point, we got new 1000mbs switches at our location. Life was better but we had already gone to using local disks in our site defs. Then several of us moved away and we all went 99% remote. Due to budget cuts, our group doesn't get personal attention any more from PC/LAN admins. We're often on different versions of DW. It's futile to fight the machine so we just stick to site defs with local files on individual PCs, remote files on a web or file server depending on the project. Subversion would be a good idea but we just set up a check-in/out procedure that everyone follows and that has been sufficient for collaboration.
Jason C. LevineDon't talk to me.
CERTIFIED EXPERT

Author

Commented:
Check-In/Check-Out works fine if and only if the following is true:

"procedure that everyone follows"

Because Dreamweaver allows other Dreamweaver users to overwrite CI/CO at whim.  So one bad user can ruin the whole thing.  Subversion will protect against that, at the price of complexity.

Have a question about something in this article? You can receive help directly from the article author. Sign up for a free trial to get started.