(Archived) MASSIVE memory leak in EN - staff don't understand

[clickbuild 0]

I have a MASSIVE, repeatable, provable memory leak in Evernote desktop.

When first opened EN takes about 50meg. Each save sucks up 100% of CPU for 10-30 seconds and RAM goes up by 100 - 300meg each save. If open for the day EN tops out at about 1.2 GIG of ram.

I have documented this with text, images and video of the leak happening in real time. I have tried going through support a number of times and they just (metaphorically) stare at me blankly, like they don't understand computers, so I figured I'd try here.

I've written plenty of my own server and desktop apps and a couple are used by F500 companies, so I know what a bug looks like.

The problem seems to come from the text parser running into characters is cannot handle as the activity log has hundreds of lines like this for each save:

2011-04-24 13:45:35 0xa124f0 [ENXHTMLToENMLConverter] DEBUG: Dropping 'p'

2011-04-24 13:45:35 0xa124f0 [ENMLValidationHelper] ERROR: Failed to parse '(null)'

The "dropping" line shows for most html tags like p, span, div etc, followed by a 'null' line.

Yes, yes - you're going to say I should just delete the offending "note". But...

Firstly, Evernote should not crash like this, even if there are odd characters in the notes

Second, if you understand computers you'll know that "null" is invisible, so it cannot been seen

Third, I have about 300 notes - how do I find the time (and xray vision) to search for invisible characters in 300 notes?

I am hoping the Evernote programmers can fix this bug so that I and anyone else that accidentally pasted null chars into the app don't end up with an unusable program.

Steve

[jefito 5,589]

First, support people generally aren't programmers, but if you've submitted the offending note, then they should have enough to pass on to the actual devs. Second, we here in the forum aren't Evernote developers, mainly, so we are probably not going to be able to help you much either. So you've submitted support tickets for this, and you haven't gotten any replies? Or did you just get a "we're looking into it" sort of reply. You should try to escalate this higher. It sounds as though there's some part of your workflow that creates these problematic notes -- have you been able to isolate that? The '(null)' thing is kind of interesting, but it doesn't in and of itself mean that there are null characters in your note; I know of some run-time systems that put something like "(null)" at address 0, in case a 0 pointer was dereferenced and printed. Oh yes, did Evernote actually crash? You started off with claiming a memory leak, not a crash.

[clickbuild 0]

Hey,

@jefito

Thanks for a useful reply - the best yet. And yes, I understand that tier 1 support is just for general stuff. I just figured if someone sent in a video of the app dying they might move the ticket up the chain.

No, the app does not crash.

Example support:

My first detailed ticket got the response:

We would recommend that you uninstall Evernote and reboot your computer. Then reinstall.

I sent a video of the RAM leak, they wrote:

Unfortunately the log indicates that there is a problem with the note named. This could have happened for many reasons, and we currently recommend that you copy the information out of the note, delete the note and empty the trash folder.

Just in case they *had* figured it out I did as suggested, even going to far as to strip high and low ascii from the text and destyling it before pasting back. Restarted the app and the next save consumed 500meg.

Just out of interest I created a new note, pasted a short ebook from Word into a new note - CPU 100%, RAM to 860meg

Activity log now showing even more errors. Basically I can do this all day and EN fails every time. Ugh.

2011-04-24 20:46:16 0x13d8c1d0 [ENNoteThumbnailManager] DEBUG: Generating thumbnail for note: 'Untitled Note'

2011-04-24 20:46:16 0x13d8c1d0 [ENNoteThumbnailManager] DEBUG: guid: (null)

2011-04-24 20:46:16 0x13d8c1d0 [ENAppController] ERROR: EXCEPTION: launch path not accessible

2011-04-24 20:46:16 0x13d8c1d0 [ENAppController] ERROR: 0x98606d24 0x97934509 0x97cf23e8 0x97cf235a 0x96c96b61 0x96c96974 0x1ac43a 0x1ac228 0x14c88f 0x14cdb7 0x96c44ad0 0x96c44a80 0x976957fd 0x97695682

2011-04-24 20:46:16 0x13d8c1d0 [ENNoteThumbnailManager] INFO: Exception generating thumbnail for note. ID: 0x1c3abd80

2011-04-24 20:46:16 0x13d8c1d0 [ENNoteThumbnailManager] INFO: exception: launch path not accessible

2011-04-24 20:46:31 0xa124f0 [ENNoteAttributeFieldController] DEBUG: Updating note property 'title' from text field.

2011-04-24 20:47:24 0x13d8c1d0 [ENNoteThumbnailManager] DEBUG: Generating thumbnail for note: 'Untitled Note'

2011-04-24 20:47:24 0x13d8c1d0 [ENNoteThumbnailManager] DEBUG: guid: (null)

2011-04-24 20:47:24 0x13d8c1d0 [ENAppController] ERROR: EXCEPTION: launch path not accessible

2011-04-24 20:47:24 0x13d8c1d0 [ENAppController] ERROR: 0x98606d24 0x97934509 0x97cf23e8 0x97cf235a 0x96c96b61 0x96c96974 0x1ac43a 0x1ac228 0x14c88f 0x14cdb7 0x96c44ad0 0x96c44a80 0x976957fd 0x97695682

2011-04-24 20:47:24 0x13d8c1d0 [ENNoteThumbnailManager] INFO: Exception generating thumbnail for note. ID: 0xe1a8b0

2011-04-24 20:47:24 0x13d8c1d0 [ENNoteThumbnailManager] INFO: exception: launch path not accessible

2011-04-24 20:47:26 0xa124f0 [ENMLPasteboardUtils] DEBUG: Pasteboard types: (

"dyn.ah62d4rv4gk8yky4mk6",

"CorePasteboardFlavorType 0x44534947",

"dyn.ah62d4rv4gk8ykx4cmk",

"CorePasteboardFlavorType 0x444F424A",

"dyn.ah62d4rv4gk8y8uwnku",

"CorePasteboardFlavorType 0x4F424A44",

"public.rtf",

"NeXT Rich Text Format v1.0 pasteboard type",

"public.html",

"Apple HTML pasteboard type",

"dyn.ah62d4rv4gk81g7d3ru",

"CorePasteboardFlavorType 0x7374796C",

"dyn.ah62d4rv4gk81n65yru",

"CorePasteboardFlavorType 0x7573746C",

"com.apple.traditional-mac-plain-text",

"CorePasteboardFlavorType 0x54455854",

"public.utf8-plain-text",

NSStringPboardType,

"public.utf16-plain-text",

"CorePasteboardFlavorType 0x75747874",

"com.apple.pict",

"Apple PICT pasteboard type",

"com.adobe.pdf",

"Apple PDF pasteboard type",

"dyn.ah62d4rv4gk8ynxncnq",

"CorePasteboardFlavorType 0x454D4253",

"dyn.ah62d4rv4gk8y8vwxkq",

"CorePasteboardFlavorType 0x4F465343"

)

2011-04-24 20:47:26 0xa124f0 [ENMLPasteboardUtils] DEBUG: Using 'Apple HTML pasteboard type'

2011-04-24 20:47:27 0xa124f0 [WebResource] INFO: Archive encoding name: 'UTF-8'

2011-04-24 20:47:27 0xa124f0 [ENMLConverter] DEBUG: Detected MS Word HTML fragment

2011-04-24 20:47:27 0xa124f0 [ENMLConverter] DEBUG: fixed 103 '

2011-04-24 20:47:27 0xa124f0 [ENMLConverter] DEBUG: fixed 277 '

'

2011-04-24 20:47:27 0xa124f0 [ENMLConverter] DEBUG: fixed 277 ''

2011-04-24 20:47:27 0xa124f0 [ENMLConverter] DEBUG: fixed 14 newline spans

2011-04-24 20:47:27 0xa124f0 [ENMLConverter] INFO: HTML fragment has no XML declaration and no DOCTYPE declaration.

2011-04-24 20:47:27 0xa124f0 [ENMLConverter] INFO: Parse failed w/o HTML tidy.

2011-04-24 20:47:28 0xa124f0 [ENMLValidationHelper] ERROR: Failed to parse '(null)'

2011-04-24 20:47:28 0xa124f0 [ENXHTMLToENMLConverter] DEBUG: Dropping 'div'

2011-04-24 20:47:28 0xa124f0 [ENMLValidationHelper] ERROR: Failed to parse '(null)'

2011-04-24 20:47:28 0xa124f0 [ENMLValidationHelper] ERROR: Failed to parse '(null)'

2011-04-24 20:47:28 0xa124f0 [ENXHTMLToENMLConverter] DEBUG: Dropping 'br'

2011-04-24 20:47:28 0xa124f0 [ENMLValidationHelper] ERROR: Failed to parse '(null)'

2011-04-24 20:47:28 0xa124f0 [ENXHTMLToENMLConverter] DEBUG: Dropping 'div'

2011-04-24 20:47:28 0xa124f0 [ENMLValidationHelper] ERROR: Failed to parse '(null)'

2011-04-24 20:47:28 0xa124f0 [ENXHTMLToENMLConverter] DEBUG: Dropping 'span'

2011-04-24 20:47:28 0xa124f0 [ENMLValidationHelper] ERROR: Failed to parse '(null)'

2011-04-24 20:47:28 0xa124f0 [ENXHTMLToENMLConverter] DEBUG: Dropping 'div'

[ ETC ]

Steve

[jefito 5,589]

Ironically, this suggestion, posted here on the forum, will probably not make it through to anyone at Evernote who matters, just a few "Evernote Evangelists."

I am pretty sure that Dave Engberg (the Evernote CTO) does read every post on the forum, and he replies to a fair amount of them. I think that he matters. I share your thanks to clickbuild for taking the time to document the problem, and hope that that was also submitted in a support ticket.

[geechorama 1]

Hey Steve. The following portion of your log makes me think there is something wrong with the copy of Evernote you have on your machine:

2011-04-24 20:46:16 0x13d8c1d0 [ENNoteThumbnailManager] DEBUG: Generating thumbnail for note: 'Untitled Note'

2011-04-24 20:46:16 0x13d8c1d0 [ENNoteThumbnailManager] DEBUG: guid: (null)

2011-04-24 20:46:16 0x13d8c1d0 [ENAppController] ERROR: EXCEPTION: launch path not accessible

2011-04-24 20:46:16 0x13d8c1d0 [ENAppController] ERROR: 0x98606d24 0x97934509 0x97cf23e8 0x97cf235a 0x96c96b61 0x96c96974 0x1ac43a 0x1ac228 0x14c88f 0x14cdb7 0x96c44ad0 0x96c44a80 0x976957fd 0x97695682

2011-04-24 20:46:16 0x13d8c1d0 [ENNoteThumbnailManager] INFO: Exception generating thumbnail for note. ID: 0x1c3abd80

2011-04-24 20:46:16 0x13d8c1d0 [ENNoteThumbnailManager] INFO: exception: launch path not accessible

Can you try downloading and running a fresh copy from the website and see if that helps at all?

If not, please export one of the notes causing you trouble (as an .enex file) and direct message me so I can take a look at it.

Thanks!

[clickbuild 0]

This second time off replacing and using the app had a "converting notes" step before the updated app launched and the app appears to be behaving now.

Perhaps the conversion fixed a note problem. I don't know, but I am happy I can use EN again.

Thanks!

Steve