(Archived) 5555 notes!

[pendolino 6]

i just hit exactly 5555 notes a few seconds ago. how many notes do you have? does evernote for desktop get slower the more you put in it?

[jbenson2 2,147]

I've got 6,200 notes - half are website captures of political news and the other half are personal scanned items. Very few of them are straight text files.

I haven't noticed any slowdown in the regular running of Evernote.

The only difference is when I manually load Evernote after a reboot, it seems to take a little bit longer to load. But once it is running, it seems just as fast as when I first started using the program a couple years ago.

[TheGurkha 1]

A somewhat puny 340 notes!

[pendolino 6]

The only difference is when I manually load Evernote after a reboot, it seems to take a little bit longer to load. But once it is running, it seems just as fast as when I first started using the program a couple years ago.

I also acutely notice the sluggish startup time and agree that once its up and running its much zippier. Sometime I forget (on my mac) to just hide the app and keep it running and instead choose 'quit'. This happens rarely though as i keep it 'always on'.

I also notice that PDF documents, both small or large, seem to slow down the app.

Hopefully the developers keep enhancing the database to anticipate scale. I am also pretty confident that those customers with premium accounts are also the ones with the largest databases and a commitment to the platform so they should be more likely to keep them happy and support them.

[engberg 89]

Thanks for the feedback. We are working on performance/scalability improvements for both clients. For example, the text search on the Mac client is a bit slow with large accounts, so we're planning to fix this with some advanced text indexing solutions.

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

I have 20064 notes with a db size of ~2.5 gigs. I have several PDFS. My notes also contain some Word docs, Excel, zip files, audio files, along with the standard text and screen caps. With Windows client 3.5.4.2343 (85292), I just did the hot key for "Find In Evernote" (defaults to all notes in all notebooks) & typed three words (Beyond compare scooter). That process (including starting from one notebook & pressing the global "Find in Evernote" hotkey) took less than 10 seconds to find six notes pertaining to the software product "Beyond Compare" by Scooter Software.

As far as the start up time...I don't know if any of you experienced it or recall this, but 3.1 would often take a while to start up, showing a progress bar. Plus, it sometimes would have to do the progress bar "preparing notes for display" or something like that. I don't notice a slow start up of this version but that could be b/c I start it & then do something else. Then I tend to leave it running pretty much 24/7.

I know some earlier versions of 3.5 were sluggish when switching notebooks or searching. But the current version seems very fast, IMO.

(Tips hat to EN team!)

[TheGurkha 1]

20064!

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

20064!

There are many people with a lot more notes than I have!

[pendolino 6]

I have 20064 notes with a db size of ~2.5 gigs.

is there a quick way to see the size of an Evernote database? i only see bandwidth monthly usage in the app itself.

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

If you're on Windows, look at the size of your .exb file. Tools/options/general shows you the folder location.

[ruudhein 29]

5262 notes.

At several points in time I've made a note of the number of notes in Evernote (and thoughts in PersonalBrain). On average I now grow Evernote by 6 notes a day.

[engberg 89]

The average for an active user is about one note every two days. So anyone with more than a thousand is above average. :-)

[crane 40]

The average for an active user is about one note every two days. So anyone with more than a thousand is above average. :-)

Wow, no wonder there are users out there that don't 'get' what power users are asking for. I'm not being sarcastic; I'm just trying to think of what software I use such that I only create a thing every other day. Hmmmm, itunes playlist maybe? I might use an Microsoft Office product every other day. But when I *use* a piece of software, I'm *using* it hard - this month, I've averaged 15 notes/per day, and I don't use it much outside of work. Interesting stat.

[jbenson2 2,147]

Just from reading the forum postings, the variety of Evernote users is amazing.

Ranging

from first-time users to full-blown software code writers

from users with a few posts/week to users who have stored thousands of records

One stat that blew me away was :

Dave Engberg on May 24

There were 4,575 requests to our "forgot password" page yesterday (a Sunday),

Wow! Maybe the users pushing for a secondary lock on their iPads have a point (LOL)

Evernote CEO Phil Libin has pointed out - the longer a user stays with Evernote, the better the chance the user will convert to Premium status.

[engberg 89]

crane -

Any average takes into account a pretty wide range of people, skewed by the extremes. (When Bill Gates walks into a bar, the average net worth of people in the bar goes up by about a billion dollars...)

Of the ~250,000 different people who used Evernote yesterday, the average was one note per every two users, but that includes many people who only referenced Evernote briefly without creating a note, and also people who imported 100 PDFs. It even includes "power users" of a different type:

I used Evernote off and on for about 3 hours yesterday for non-work-related stuff. About two hours of that was referencing and light editing notes about a video game from my laptop while playing the game on my PC. (No, I'm not a proud man.)

The third hour was spent referencing a clip of http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/13/healt ... ealth.html from my Droid while cooking.

Power user? Probably.

Notes created? 0.

The soup? Pretty tasty, and a lot faster with my pressure cooker.

[jefito 5,589]

I used Evernote off and on for about 3 hours yesterday for non-work-related stuff. About two hours of that was referencing and light editing notes about a video game from my laptop while playing the game on my PC. (No, I'm not a proud man.)

Hey, it was Sunday, and you were also in the forums posting. Nothing wrong with a little bit of R&R too.

(checking out the soup)

~Jeff

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

(checking out the soup)

The soup sounds similar to what I make, which is modified from "The Savory Way" by Deborah Madison.

(Which I also make in a pressure cooker.)

Add warm, homemade tortillas & there you go.

[aleelee28 0]

I was also shocked that the average user creates one note every two days. I have just over 2,000 notes. I created 48 in April, 78 in May (scanned a few things) and 34 in June. That is just new notes. I use Evernote several times a day. I delete unneeded notes regularly to keep my notes at a manageable level. I don't really consider myself a power user, but I guess I am way above average.

Engberg, I also keep game info in Evernote to refer to when I'm playing!

[jefito 5,589]

I was also shocked that the average user creates one note every two days. I have just over 2,000 notes. I created 48 in April, 78 in May (scanned a few things) and 34 in June. That is just new notes. I use Evernote several times a day. I delete unneeded notes regularly to keep my notes at a manageable level. I don't really consider myself a power user, but I guess I am way above average.

I don't understand why this statistic would be shocking to anyone. Evernote has a large number of users (3 million+), not all of whom are as enthusiastic as some of the folks here. Some of the users are probably just kicking the tires, so to speak, and some are just not that much in need of note taking/clipping capabilities. Doesn't surprise me in the least. I'm speaking as someone who uses Evernote every day, in my own idiosyncratic way, but only have 340 or so total notes to date.

Besides, an average is a pretty limited statistic -- seeing the curve of usage (notes/day by number of users) would be far more interesting.

~Jeff

[pendolino 6]

crane -

Any average takes into account a pretty wide range of people, skewed by the extremes. (When Bill Gates walks into a bar, the average net worth of people in the bar goes up by about a billion dollars...)

so this begs the questions: what does the MEDIAN evernote user have in number of notes?

[engberg 89]

Don't know offhand ... medians for 3.4 million users and 100+ million notes across 33 different storage servers are a bit of a bear to calculate, and that actually doesn't even answer an interesting question, since you're comparing people who've used Evernote for 2 years with people that started yesterday.

So Phil likes to do even more complicated analysis based on different "cohorts" of users who joined during the same month:

http://mobile.venturebeat.com/2010/03/2 ... free-apps/

http://vimeo.com/11932184

But this is the sort of number crunching that blows a whole weekend, so I only do that when the boss says I have to.

[jefito 5,589]

But can't the boss crunch his own numbers?

.

.

.

Oh, wait...

(just kidding)

~Jeff

BTW, I hope that you're trying to keep some of your weekends to yourselves -- I mean, I understand the dynamic, but at this point, I like to have time for myself, too.

[pendolino 6]

medians for 3.4 million users and 100+ million notes across 33 different storage servers are a bit of a bear to calculate

i get what you're saying but this got me wondering about how crude our day-to-day business analysis methods are compared to the apparent push-button simplicity of apps like Evernote and Web2.0 tools? If it doesn't fit on a single spreadsheet to be sorted then its a chore

Back to the main point, however, I still think speed and a snappy feel will heavily influence Evernote's development. On that note, btw, the iPhone app has definitely stabilized and with iOS4 seems snappier already although we're still waiting for the state-save update. Given how large my DB is, I don't save notes offline on the iPhone as I think it slows it down. fyi.

[ct236 1]

I expect I will have an awfully large database eventually, like BurgersNFries below. However, I'm finding that my searches, especially global searches, are seriously slow sometimes. Like in excess of 10 seconds (and I have only about 1700 notes in my 3.5 EN). Given that it takes so long sometimes, I'm wondering if it wouldn't be a help to have some kind of "completion bar" or hourglass or something to tell the user that EverNote is still conducting a search or otherwise working.

Or, it could be that there's something wrong with the way I've got my program set up. Advice, either way? ---Tim C.

I have 20064 notes with a db size of ~2.5 gigs. I have several PDFS. My notes also contain some Word docs, Excel, zip files, audio files, along with the standard text and screen caps. With Windows client 3.5.4.2343 (85292), I just did the hot key for "Find In Evernote" (defaults to all notes in all notebooks) & typed three words (Beyond compare scooter). That process (including starting from one notebook & pressing the global "Find in Evernote" hotkey) took less than 10 seconds to find six notes pertaining to the software product "Beyond Compare" by Scooter Software.

As far as the start up time...I don't know if any of you experienced it or recall this, but 3.1 would often take a while to start up, showing a progress bar. Plus, it sometimes would have to do the progress bar "preparing notes for display" or something like that. I don't notice a slow start up of this version but that could be b/c I start it & then do something else. Then I tend to leave it running pretty much 24/7.

I know some earlier versions of 3.5 were sluggish when switching notebooks or searching. But the current version seems very fast, IMO.

(Tips hat to EN team!)

[pendolino 6]

I've sometimes found that avoiding thumbnail view on the Mac Evernote helps.

[engberg 89]

Yes, the current Mac text search mechanism isn't designed correctly for large numbers of notes. This is on our list to improve with a better full-text search index to optimize searching.