Oxygen slows down when opening large DITA maps — any optimization tips?

[earthworm]

Hi everyone,

I’ve been running into performance issues when working with large DITA maps (50+ topics) in Oxygen XML Editor. Opening, expanding, or validating these maps takes several minutes, and sometimes Oxygen becomes almost unresponsive.

I’ve already tried increasing the memory allocation in the oxygen.vmoptions file, but the improvement was minimal. Disabling validation-on-open helped a bit, yet the lag persists when editing or searching through references.

Has anyone discovered practical ways to optimize Oxygen for big DITA projects — maybe specific settings, plugins, or workflows that make it run smoother?

Any advice or best practices from your experience would be awesome.
Thanks in advance!

[Radu]

Hi,

The Oxygen User's Manual has about 2000 topics referenced in a DITA Map:
https://github.com/oxygenxml/userguide

We use Oxygen to work on the user's guide with the Git client add-on integrated in Oxygen.
Opening the Oxygen user's guide DITA Map in the Oxygen DITA Maps Manager view from the local Git repository takes about 2 seconds for me.

Is it possible you are working with resources from a remote storage location like a CMS? If so, then the problem is possibly caused by network latency and maybe needs to be investigated by the CMS vendor who created the connection plugin for Oxygen.

Regards,
Radu

[bunny6t54]

Hi Radu,

Thanks for your response! I’m actually working directly from a local Git repository, not through a CMS or any remote connection. That’s why I was a bit surprised to see the delay when opening the DITA Map in Oxygen. I’ll double-check my local setup and see if any background processes might be affecting performance, but if you have any additional suggestions or optimization tips, ,I’d really appreciate them.

Best regards,
[Chirs]

[Radu]

Hi,

Strange, if in the Oxygen Preferences->"Plugins" page you have any plugin listed as installed, maybe you can disable all plugins, restart and see if the performance improves. If it does, enable the plugins one by one and restart until you find the one which seems to be to blame.
Do you also have DITA framework configurations specific for your company? Maybe a DITA DTD specialization?

Regards,
Radu

[Radu]

Hi,

Another possibility would be if Oxygen somehow goes online to download DTDs, again possibly caused by a faulty DITA framework specialization.
If you disable your network access and work with DITA Maps, does Oxygen report an error that it cannot open a certain remote resource?

Regards,
Radu