great software, but too slow on large projects

Sadly I’ll need to abandon working with Scrivener for a while…it’s been a great way to get a lot of material into one place. It started slowing down at around 50,000 words but now that I’m at 100,000 words Scrivener is painfully slow and I’ll need to resort to another method. I’ll be back…in a year or two no doubt…

I found from this site
http://davidmkelly.net/2013/02/24/scrivener-auto-save-blues-reprise/
that the 2 second auto-save was on, no wonder it was slow. I’ve changed this to the maximum of 500 seconds…and have also tried disabling other features and it is still unusably slow

Are you noticing slowness mainly in composite mode or when working with separate documents as well?

You have not told us precisely what features are performing sluggishly for you, but try setting the default view for all your documents to outline. That should dramatically increase performance while you are editing and navigating your documents. kraml

Most importantly, it is not normal for Scrivener to slow down at 100 000 words. I have projects that go beyond that by far, and can’t say I’ve experienced any signs of sluggishness in any parts of my Scrivener-experience. So you can rest assured that your experience is not normal behaviour and most likely can be fixed.

Are you writing all of your words in one document? That’s the only way I can think of to make Scrivener respond sluggishly, other than to load that many words worth of documents in Scrivenings view; but that is only sluggish until it’s done loading them all up.