Speed, crashes

Hi. Am currently testing EF … and am very impressed by the feature set and design. However, I am experiencing performance issues that make EF almost unusable for me.

As an example, in preparing this post I attempted to import a webarchive from Safari using Function_Option_F1, and it took 10 minutes from the time of the click until the Import Dialog popped up. During that time, EF was using between 30% and 60% of the CPU. It was backing up metadata at the time. This is not an unusual instance … I was experiencing this sort of performance all day yesterday.

I had two crashes this morning … and sent the crash reports along.

After that, I opened EF several times, waited until all records were found, and then shut it down normally to see if this would help reset things. I also tried resetting the indexes … and am now waiting for the records to be reindexed.

So far, I have imported 24000 records. This is running on a 2006 Powerbook with 2GB of RAM, using 10.5.2. To try to speed things up, I took advantage of the Esoteric Preference commands and switched off various settings … but this has not made any appreciable difference so far.

I’ll happily become a customer if I can solve these performance issues … so would be grateful for any advice about other steps I could take to speed things up.

That doesn’t sound normal. It should take a few seconds at most. Is it faster if you just press F1?

If this is a reproducible issue, it would be helpful if you could open the Activity Monitor program and select EagleFiler in the list. While you’re waiting for the Capture With Options dialog to appear, choose Sample Process from the View menu. Then save the resulting data to a file and send it to me.

When pressing Option-F1, or when doing other things? Does it help if you click the x button to cancel the metadata backup? Or if you turn off automatic metadata backup? In order to help you, I need to know specifically what you were doing and what was slow.

I only received the one where you wrote that it was “indexing” when it crashed. It looks like you had just clicked on a button. Do you recall which one?

Are you running other applications that might be using a lot of that RAM? With 24,000 records it will take a while to open the library, but I would expect the performance to be fine once it’s open and the indexing is complete. (I use a similar test library on a 12" PowerBook G4.) That said, if you can partition your files into multiple smaller libraries it will make things go faster.

Which ones?