Forum Discussion
64bit and Multithread Workloads for Storyline
I just want to share something I have been sitting on for quite some time and that is my thoughts on the frankly old architexture that Storyline 360 is built on. From a back end point of view it only seams to be a marginal leap over Storyline 2 and none of the real performance issues that came in storyline 2 have been improved on in 360 / 3. Now in truth this may not be the case, it may have been re built from the ground up as some responses from Articulate have suggested but from a users perspective this seems to be simply untrue. There are a few outstanding questions asked by people on this forum dating back to 2016 regarding 64bit Support and with that Multithread workload support. Every response to these has been 'submit a feature request' of which those I have spoken too, all have submitted this request and it has fallen on deaf ears. Can we please have an actual answer on whether or not this support is coming on the development roadmap?
To give a bit of reasoning stoyline as a 32bit app is currently limited to single thread (1 cpu core) support and 4gb of RAM. If your system has a multi core cpu (which in almost every case it will have) that is system hoursepower that is untapped and similarly if you have over 4GB of ram, and the system average according to hardware surveys is 8GB for the average user these days. It is possible for a 32bit app to use multiple threads but that does not seam to be the case here monitoring the cpu loads when using storyline.
Storyline 360 is a new product, that is already old out of the box. As developers we are using products like Blender and the Adobe Creative suite along side this product to develop our courses, all of which have been native 64 bit only apps for almost a decade and take full advantage of a system, and for those who do video editting and 3D design to create content for their courses, they will have extremely powerful computers that are being completely underutilised by Storyline. A lot of the performance issues we see on a day to day basis are due to running out of memory or being bogged down by a single cpu core due to these limitations.
This is not a feature request this is an architecture request, this is a plea to just tell us is this on the roadmap, because I and many other developers are rapidly starting to loose patience in this products inability to keep up with the pace of the people who use it in this industry.
Hi Everyone!
Great news! I'm happy to share that we just released Storyline 360 (version 3.82.31354.0), which includes a new 64-bit version of Storyline 360! Harness the processing power in modern computers with 64-bit Storyline 360. Large, media-rich courses benefit from increased stability and faster performance!
To use 64-bit Storyline 360, please update your Articulate 360 desktop app, then click the Install button next to the Storyline 360 app with the 64-bit and beta labels. The Install button will change to an Open button when the installation is complete.
This was highly requested, so we hope it serves you in your course creation! If you run into any snags, don't hesitate to contact our team in a support case.
I put together a powerhouse PC a few months ago (Intel i9-13900K, 96GB RAM, Gen 4 PCIE SSDs, 12GB GPU, etc.), hopeful that Articulate 360 would run faster, and it does to an extent, but because of the 32-bit limitations, it was only going to improve somewhat. I just installed the 64-bit version, hoping that things would fly. Sadly, the improvements in Save and Publish times are quite modest.
I will note that for the most part, I rarely had any crashes with the 32-bit version.
Here's some rudimentary testing I did for some sample courses I've been working on (values are elapsed seconds)
course size of .story file save 32-bit publish 32-bit save 64-bit publish 64-bit Course A 33MB 5.8 57.3 5.3 54.2 Course B 100MB 10.5 141.3 10.1 100.3 Course C 30MB 3.5 30.9 2.9 26.5 Course D 104MB 8.7 71.9 7.7 71.6 Hi Bill!
Thank you for the detailed feedback!
We appreciate you taking the time to share those specifications with the community. We're always looking to improve our products for our users, so I've notified our Storyline product team as well.
Have a great rest of your week!
I can understand your frustration, and for the time being I would suggest doing anything CPU intentive like video editing in software dedicated to that task, and then inserting the video into Storyline.
I'm not sure this really addresses the problem, can you provide a better response to the actual points raised?
Hi Lizzie,
I don't have a timeframe to share yet as our team is continuing to work on these memory/performance issues. As we are closer to an update that would include those features we'll be certain to let folks know!
Luke,
Thanks for that info too - I can share it with the team to keep an eye on the processors used as they continue to work on this. If you have any other experiences to share, please let me know and I can pass along, or feel free to share with our Support Team. We're all working together to build a product you can truly love using, so any additional feedback is welcome and appreciated. 😀
Has anything happened with multithread support and the limitation of 32 bit memory handling?
It's key information when planning for investment in new hardware. Should we go for multicore or higher clock rate... ? Should we invest in more RAM...?Hi Mikael,
Our team is still investigating a 64-bit version of Storyline, and we'll update this discussion as soon as we have more info to share!
As for what to invest in with hardware, I'll leave that to our community experts building many more courses than I!
I agree, we need better performance to take advantage of multicore computers.
Sorry If I missed something in the thread but is Presenter (the version in 360) multi thread capable?
Hi Graham,
Thanks for reaching out with your additional question.
To share a reply that our engineering team shared with us:
We do not target any specific cores, the operating system does that. We are multi-threaded where we can be.
Are you running into an issue that we can help with?
No issues, just deciding which Intel processor to buy, i8 or i9 - i9 has more core/thread capabilities....
What other programs will you be using? The AMD Ryzen 3950x (the baby ripper) is one of the best processors for bang for your buck, also the 3900 is wonderful too. I'd stay away from intel for a while since AMD got their crap together with the zen 2 architecture. I'm saving for the new thread ripper because I do a lot of blender work and IPC isn't as important as thread count. Gamers Nexxus on youtube has a really great breakdown and goes really indepth on content creator's usefulness for the new AMD's. They also have PCIe 4.0 natively on all the boards.
Any other questions feel free to ask.
Oh, shopping fun :)
Thanks, Graham.
