EF 1.5.3: 'glacial' would be generous

Hi – I want to love this application, I really do. But in my experience it’s SO slow. ‘Impossible’ would be generous. It’s very clear from most sources that this is very far from normal. I’d like to fix it so I can use EF, because it seems like it could be great.

Yes, I know it’s a bit slow to start, that’s fine – I don’t need to start it that often, do I? But it takes me several seconds to: (a) switch from another app to EF, (b) give EF’s window focus by clicking on it, © switch the focus within EF from the index to the main text field, etc. Really: 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 seconds to do any one of these tasks. Every time.

This is on a MBP 2.53 ghz core i% w/ 4GB RAM, OSX 10.6.7. I don’t keep lots of apps running. My EF library isn’t that huge – 131MB with 141 files, mostly text, URLs, PDfs, etc.

What info would be helpful?

That’s not normal. Is it still slow like this if your only open library is a new, empty library stored on your MacBook Pro’s internal hard drive?

You can measure what EagleFiler is doing using the Activity Monitor application. Select EagleFiler in the list, then choose Sample Process from the View menu and do something that you know will cause one of these multi-second slowdowns. Then save the resulting data to a file and e-mail it to me.

Resolved: fast! [EF 1.5.3: ‘glacial’ would be generous]

I haven’t had time to dig into this, but I didn’t want to leave it open in a way that would suggest the problem wasn’t resolved. So, for the record: thanks for your quick(!) reply, and I took your advice – which seems to have fixed the problem.

I hope to have time to figure out why that one library got bogged down, but that’d mainly to be to help identify any obscure bugs in a great piece of software.

Thanks!
T

yes, EF is lightning fast
I upgrade my hardware about every 2 years (MB pro) but whatever hardware I use, EF is lightning fast. It pre-indexes to make searches practically instant (but does it very unobtrusively).
Size of database: I have about 10K PDFs and miscellaneous files. Some are entire books - doesn’t slow it down.

re: yes, EF is lightning fast

Agreed. The recommended fix resolved the issue and it’s quite fast now. Love it.

Glacial EF performance also!

I’ve been using EagleFiler a few days and am in the process of (manually) converting some spreadsheets into EF libraries. I think the program has great potential to solve several complex organizational problems I’m tackling. I’m sorry that my first post has to be regarding the slow performance of EF.

My experience is identical to that of tbtothee who started this thread: “it takes me several seconds to: (a) switch from another app to EF, (b) give EF’s window focus by clicking on it, (c) switch the focus within EF from the index to the main text field, etc. Really: 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 seconds to do any one of these tasks. Every time.”

For the record, I created a new library with only a few records that does not experience this problem. The two libraries that have problems have a few hundred records in them.

I see that tbtothee’s was given a recommended fix (not posted) that apparently fixed his problem. Would it be possible to post that fix on this forum, just for completeness? Thanks.

As far as I can tell, tbtothee created a new library, imported the same files, and it was fast. He or she never sent in the “sample” report (at least I can find no record of it), so the source of the problem with the original library remains unknown.

In your case, is there anything in the library’s “To Import” folder? (If a file is left there that another application has open for writing, it can slow EagleFiler down checking to see whether it’s safe to copy the file.) Could you send in a sample report?

Indeed, one of my libraries did have a file in its “To Import” folder that was open for writing (by Open Office). Once I closed this file, it file was imported successfully by EF. Now I see that the performance is again snappy in all of my libraries.

I’m glad that this solved the problem, as I would not have wanted to recreate the library from the spreadsheet. I should be able to avoid this issue in the future.

Thanks very much for your prompt response, Michael.

Michael, apologies for not sending in the Activity Monitor trace; FWIW, I hunted through my mail and didn’t turn up any private mail.