By default, WireframeSketcher uses a maximum of 1024 megabytes of system memory. Under some conditions it may prove to be insufficient. This article gives several possible solutions to common memory issues.
Preventing memory issues
WireframeSketcher is not a memory hungry application, however there are some situations that can cause it to consume more memory than needed. Here’s a list of common problems.
Opening too many files at the same time
WireframeSketcher works with files that you open for editing, at which point these files are loaded into memory. You can work with very large projects without this causing any performance issues. When you have finished working with a file, you should close it so that it’s unloaded from the memory.
This problem is not unlike the “too many open tabs” problem that often plague web browsers. So closing unused tabs is a good thing. You might be familiar with other software types that do not make this distinction between open and closed files, and leave all your tabs open, however with WireframeSketcher you should make it a habit to close unused tabs.
There are some helpful commands available in the context menu when you right click on the open tab. One is Close Others that closes all edited files except the current one. The other one is Close All that closes all edited files.
Using large images
Large bitmap images (not vector) can consume a lot of memory. A common situation occurs when you use a large multi-megabyte image with WireframeSketcher but resize the Image widget to a smaller size to fit with other wireframe elements. So you are actually using a big image in a place where a small one would do, with the downside that the large image still consumes memory and causes performance issues.
The solution is to use an image editing software to scale down the image to a more reasonable size before using it with WireframeSketcher.
Creating large storyboards
Another common problem is the creation of large storyboards with several dozens or even hundreds of screens. Large storyboards can consume a lot of memory and will certainly cause performance issues.
The solution to this problem is to split storyboards into nested storyboards. This will also make your designs more modular and easier to manage. See Nesting Storyboards section in the User Guide for more details.
Increasing available memory
If nothing else helps, or if your machine just has a lot of memory, then you can choose to increase the memory available to WireframeSketcher. This is done by editing WireframeSketcher.ini file that is found in WireframeSketcher’s installation directory. On Mac OS X this file is located in application folder under WireframeSketcher.app/Contents/MacOS.
Make sure to stop WireframeSketcher first. Then open the .ini file with a proper text editor (Notepad won’t do, but Wordpad will) and locate the line with -Xmx option that looks like this:
-Xmx1024mTo increase the available memory to 2 gigabytes you should change this line to look like this:
-Xmx2048mor alternatively like this:
-Xmx2GSave the edited .ini file and you are ready to wireframe.