Construct becomes sluggish, then freezes after 10-15min

Thank you for your response ASHLEY. I fully understand the way you're reasoning, without being able to reproduce the bug it's nearly impossible to find the cause. The good thing about this thread is that we have actually found a workaround. With the auto-save turned off I can work for a whole day straight feeling confident that Construct won't freeze. With auto-save turned on however I need to restart or force the application to shut once every 20 minutes. The strange thing that it doesn't matter which platform I use, the bug is always the same (even though my desktop computer cope with the slowdown a bit better).

The Steam Overlay doesn't do anything in my experience, but I have disabled it as it is utterly useless in construct. I'm actually quite happy with the workaround, I can actually live with that. But I'm thinking about asking for a refund just to catch the attention of Steam support, and shed some light on the issue. It has been reported before, and we're a couple of people experiencing it (god knows how many, I waited almost a year before I reported)

Thank you — for pointing me in the right direction for a good workaround, as well as being committed in this thread.

I will mostly likely go on working like I did before, at least I just have to minimize and reopen the window and everything works fine then.

Thank you Ashley for the fast response, good luck on waiting for Valve to answer you. (Valve will take their time, like they always do...)

— nice to hear you solved the problem you had... but still continues after 1 day now? it might not bee steam or C2 ... but your hard drive ... is it almost full? what settings you have for caching things? how much space you have in the C2 auto save folder? is it OLD or new ? is it HDD or SSD?

— nice to hear you solved the problem you had... but still continues after 1 day now? it might not bee steam or C2 ... but your hard drive ... is it almost full? what settings you have for caching things? how much space you have in the C2 auto save folder? is it OLD or new ? is it HDD or SSD?

It is kinda weird, in the older versions (and I mean very old versions) this never happened to me.

To be honest I never really noticed when this sluggishness started but I guess it has something to do with Steam, since I used the standalone version then.

As I already said and Ashley confirmed, the steam version is the exact same version as the one available here so it has to be something with Steam.

I cannot do more than updating all my drivers and OS to the latest version available.

My HDD is fine and all of my hardware is up to date and powerfull enaugh.

For my side of issues it is easy to handle so I dont see any reason to go on trying to find a fix, if it works it works.

Despite warnings not to buy Contruct 2 Steam version, I ended up buying it because I had problems trying to buy at Scirra's website. So I would like to share my little experience with you. The Steam version works great for me in a general way. I actually had the problems that has been reported here, however, I also work around it basically doing what TheRealDannyyy mentioned, but with a bit difference. In my case, when Construct 2 freezes or becomes sluggish, clicks does not seem to work on Construct's 2 window, despite mouse still works, so i can't minimize or do anything with clicks. To minimize Construct 2 as TheRealDannyyy said, i simply press Alt + Tab to switch window and then Alt + Tab again to return to Construct 2. This solves the problem instantly for me. I used Construct 2 all day long and could bypass the issue just doing that, but it only happened 2 or 3 times. I know that experiences may vary from user to user, but this work around has not caused me major hassles. I hope this could help you, and may also help developers to track down the issue.

Just to give you some details, my sys specs (Intel i5 3570k, Windows 7 64 bit, 16 Gb ram, Radeon HD7870 2Gb).

As i had only one day to use it, i'll let you know if something goes wrong. But i don't think so.

Best whishes!

Enjoy your new "Steam software", I have one more idea that came into my mind today about the sluggishness.

Do you guys have "Mobile Previewing" enabled? (This thing)

Thanks! Mine is on default. Didn't changed anything yet.

Edit (not to post again):

Has occured me that the sluggish may be caused by some Steam process in the background, such as alerts (when a friend login or start a game), game updates (download), Steam overlay, and so on. I spent all day as offline (but online) so i did not get any of this alerts. Maybe it is just a coincidence, but Construct 2 didn't freezes or become sluggish until now.

Best wishes!

— nice to hear you solved the problem you had... but still continues after 1 day now? it might not bee steam or C2 ... but your hard drive ... is it almost full? what settings you have for caching things? how much space you have in the C2 auto save folder? is it OLD or new ? is it HDD or SSD?

I have a core i5 4670K clocked at 4Ghz with 16GB of DDR3 1866MHz memory, Geforce GTX960 and a Corsair Force LS 240GB SSD. and my other computer is a laptop, quad core AMD A4-5000 APU clocked at 1.5Ghz with built in Radeon 8330 graphics, 16GB of DDR3 1600MHz memory and an unknown 256GB SSD drive. The problem acts out in similar fashion for me. Both computers have 60+ GB free storage.

I simply press Alt + Tab to switch window and then Alt + Tab again to return to Construct 2. This solves the problem instantly for me. I used Construct 2 all day long and could bypass the issue just doing that, but it only happened 2 or 3 times.

I actually was never able to bypass the freezes with alt+tab. Well sometimes Construct semi-freezes for me, but just for a short while, in those cases, alt+tab has worked for me, but once it reeeeeeaaaaally freezes, there's no way to recover responsiveness in the application, the only thing I can do is try to make construct save the changes by pressing the save icon constantly and then try to close the application or force it to close. However, The "disable auto-save workaround" has worked for me.

Nowadays Construct isn't that much of a hassle, especially since I have adopted this workaround.

Enjoy your new "Steam software", I have one more idea that came into my mind today about the sluggishness.

Do you guys have "Mobile Previewing" enabled? (This thing)

Yes and no, on my desktop computer (i5) I preview my creations on a tablet and a phone, while my laptop, which actually have more or less mobile-chip webGL performance I have it set to localhost. that doesn't seem to do any difference to the issue I'm have been having.

— dont know then.. im out

do a SSD consistency check , and fragmentation, and make sure u open c2 as administrator, it may cause problems, if ur using non administrator accounts or privileges, and also if ur HDD SDD has a slight bug of writing reading cache where c2 stores... thats what happens for me most of times... my hdds are almost dead ... still have plenty of space for bigger programs to run, the thing is .. a portion of the partition which by default on c2 is the C drive where u also have the windows most of times installed.. doesn't reads it fast enough or just could not read some data... that might be your problem, i think this is either a Hardware one or smthing blocks C2 ability to read the cached data. i cant see why it acts on ur side that way... ur RIG is pretty strong ... 5 times stronger then mine.. and i never had a full freeze on c2 my only freeze as i told before was when i was using AFFX which almost kills my computer by itself.. skype and teamviewer all at once then i opened c2 and yea no more memory... but in ur case thats not it.. i doubt will be a steam problem... or c2 steam platform problem... is something else to do... what programs are running in bg? can u run only C2 trough steam platform only? dont use firefox or other stuff opened.. make sure u dont have any bg software's.. CTRL ALT DEL task manager it ... then see if the sluggishness still happens.. maybe is steam trying to close other software's or bg processes... if ur in game mode.. but then... not sure if i might be right on any of the above points... and im pretty sure you already tried all those ... have no idea then really — without a error report on crash ... to see what causes it we cant say .. really. we only can presume things goes wrong..

As we said several times before, we all have quite good setups and pretty clean systems running.

I don't think that we have a hardware problem since we all have kinda the same issue.

Also if we are supposed to use Steam's offline mode while using C2 I see no point in using C2 over Steam then anyways.

I really appreciate that you guys try to solve the problem but I think any suggestion according to hardware rigs should not be posted anymore.

Please let's only post real fixes or workarounds in this report for the future, thank you very much!

I don't have any workaround sadly, but I'm affected by this too and following this thread. Thanks.

Edit : I can't know for sure because of the random factor of this bug, but maybe autosaving is ok if you don't autosave to a dropbox folder. Uploading might be the freezing thing, though I'm no expert. I've changed my autosave to a local directory and will post updates if I'm magically freeze-free

Edit 2 : Nope, not that.

I sometimes had slowdowns too with the steam version. Will try to deactivate autosaving. No freezes though, just very sluggish interface, which I did not have in the free version not bound to steam - so my recommendation stands to not buy C2 on Steam but instead from scirra directly.

I seem to be having the same or a very similar issue to that described in this thread. After between 30 minutes and 5 hours of having Construct2 (steam) open, the interface will become extremely sluggish. A simple text entry will take 30 seconds to be processed.

Alt-tabbing out and back in will result in the current interface 'operation' finishing, but the extreme sluggishness persists. Task manager shows no sign of excessive resource usage.

This has persisted across multiple machines and projects for at least the last year. The only way to solve it is to close and reopen steam and Construct2.

I have tried disabling auto-save as suggested by some in this thread, but that hasn't helped.

I seem to be having the same or a very similar issue to that described in this thread. After between 30 minutes and 5 hours of having Construct2 (steam) open, the interface will become extremely sluggish. A simple text entry will take 30 seconds to be processed.

Alt-tabbing out and back in will result in the current interface 'operation' finishing, but the extreme sluggishness persists. Task manager shows no sign of excessive resource usage.

This has persisted across multiple machines and projects for at least the last year. The only way to solve it is to close and reopen steam and Construct2.

I have tried disabling auto-save as suggested by some in this thread, but that hasn't helped.

If you have backups enabled, could you please dissable them and test if that helps you out?

Disabling backups has not fixed the issue.

Disabling backups has not fixed the issue.

As you can see we did really try out almost everything that is possible.

Since we have no sort of source code from C2 to look through (of course private and only accessible for Ashley for copyrights etc.)

or any hint towards reproducing the bug, I can only say that we simply have to deal with it until C3 comes out.

(I know that this is will sound a bit mean, but I'm currently dealing with autosaving issues, unexpected audio playback issues and of course this C2 sluggishness so I'd understand if you get kinda frustrated about this. Since there is no clear way to reproduce any of these bugs, hoping for C3 is the only thing what's left for me at least...)