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Is Evernote getting overwhelmed causing systemic problems?


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I am a HUGE fan of Evernote; been premium for years and an Evernote evanglist to everyone who will listen (and have gained them quite a few converts).  But I'm concerned and wonder if others are experiencing similar issues.  Are they outgrowing their ability to support their current user base?

 

Starting about 3 weeks ago I began having a variety of problems, but the most irritating one was that I could not sync my local EN program - said there was a problem on the client side.  I tried chat and they said I'd have to open a ticket. They opened a ticket from that chat and started trying to correct this situation.  After a week of "try this, try that, etc." I had uninstalled the program, reinstalled the program (2x), installed the beta, rebuilt my database (a 10 hour process since I had to restart it 6 times due to it hanging), and tried deleting individual notes that could be the cause.  Nothing worked.  They "escalated it to technical support" (which I thought I had been dealing with).  I got NO RESPONSE from EN Technical Support for 6 days; not even when I sent emails asking if anyone was working on the issue.  This was severely hampering my ability to get work done.  Sure I was using the Web applicatoin, but couldn't transfer outlook emails or use the web clipper since they send notes to the local client for syncing.

 

I asked what was up every 2-3 days and heard nothing.  Finally I got a response and the issue was solved in 24 hours (it was a Penultimate note).  Since then I've had images disappear from my Win EN (which I recreated by copying the note in the Web application and deleting the old note) and the iOS app crash whenever trying to create a camera note.  Never had either issue before.  Today again I cannot sync my local.  After a chat, ticketing being started, and uploading the activity log I am again "dead in the water" without EN.  The issue was immediately "escalated" to technical support; I'm hopeful it's not another 6 days before I hear from them.

 

Again, I LOVE Evernote, but am getting irritated in that it used to be reliable and doesn't appear to be anymore. I'm happy for their growth and success, but is this causing problems for us long time users?

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The number of quirks you are experiencing seems to be unusually high.... I personally haven't experienced any of the issues you list here and haven't encountered any showstoppers of my own. My current irritation is with persistent crashes using the document camera on iOS, but in the grand scheme of things it isn't terrible... I haven't lost data (just a few hairs). It is possible that perhaps you are just in the midst of some terrible luck colliding all at once... (That being said, there are a number of rather significant persistent issues well documented on these forums, but most of them, like arthritis, are major chronic problems, not acute catastrophes... so Evernote does have their work cut out for them!). 
 

As for the slow support, this is something that seems to be coming up fairly often on the forums and as a fellow user I know only as much as you know, which is to say, not much, and only based on my own personal experiences and anecdotes here. The fact that as a premium user you are experiencing very slow response times is a bit dismaying.... Just the unfortunate reality for the moment, I suppose. 

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Thanks for sharing that blog post - I'd missed it.  It's encouraging to see that the CEO is willing to admit that corrective actions are needed.  But a bit furstrating that 6+ months later there is still slow responses and buggy apps.  I'm optomistic that EN can be as reliable as it has been in the past (but have always believed in back-ups!).  And I really don't want to rely on the alternative - don't want to rely on another Microsoft product (they're just too big).

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Same concerns from this 6-year Evernote user as well.
Evernote is no longer my second brain.
 
Since CEO Phil Libin's post in January (which confimed my earlier concerns), I've been moving more of my documents to other cloud services.
 

 

I too have been doing the same.  Too much lag time on Support issues, too many issues have gone unfixed for too long, and I am getting tired of dealing with an app that doesn't "just work" when I need it to.  Taking the "Middle App" out of the workflow equation may be the best thing for me.  However, I am still keeping my current data in EN in the unlikely event they come through before this contract year is terminated.

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Is Evernote dealing with Denial of Service (DoS) attacks? The past several days, nearly every one of my accesses to Evernote is taking forever. For example, http://www.evernote.com/ is taking over 30 seconds! I have been waiting minutes for my web-based interface to load. 

 

The last entry on their status page (http://status.evernote.com) shows:

 

Jul 16, 2014 (5:30 pm PT)
[ok] All systems are running smoothly
All systems are fully available at this time.

 

but then... just now, their servers seemed to speed up again. The slow-downs have been happening each day, and they have been long-running, long enough to interfere with repeated attempts to sync the Evernote client on my Macs. And it's just Evernote – no other service that I've been using behaves like this.

 

What I don't understand is why don't they give any indication of this on their status page? It's maddening to be in the dark!

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Here's my latest sync attempt. It's happening quickly today: yesterday, my Evernote syncs would run for long stretches of time before terminating with a similar error.

 

By the way, to post this image, I had to upload it to Skitch first. Syncing this image with Skitch took one minute fifteen seconds. After adding the URL to this message, it took over 40 seconds for the image to load the preview from Skitch. (I'm on a very speedy 50 mbps fiber connection.)

 

Something's going on with their servers, and it seems unconscionable to me that after all this time, I've seen no word from Evernote about what that might be.

 

rdj_1031.jpg

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  • Level 5*

Is Evernote dealing with Denial of Service (DoS) attacks? The past several days, nearly every one of my accesses to Evernote is taking forever. For example, http://www.evernote.com/ is taking over 30 seconds! I have been waiting minutes for my web-based interface to load. 

How do you know that your problem is caused by DOS attacks? I am having no such problems. Web client loads reasonably quickly, and syncs to my local machines are running smoothly. Maybe try doing a tracert to evernote.com? It may be possible that it's that particular shard, but evernote.com seems fine.

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  • Level 5
I had a sync failure about two hours ago. I did a manual sync to clear the error. Sync is running OK now.

 

Also, on July 8 - I had problems with sync failure - and was not able to sync for approximately 8 hours. I contacted support and pointed out that the Status page did not mention any problem.

 

They investigated and responded:

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

The errors in the log were caused by a minor service outage on our end, that we identified and resolved on Wednesday morning.

Everything is now running smoothly on our end, so if sync has resumed for you, then there is no cause for further concern.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

 

So I wonder what criteria is used to change the status website.

If it is a minor service outage, then it does not seem to meet their criteria?

 

I'd suggest you submit a support request to Evernote.

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I do not know that it's DoS attacks, but I recall hearing that Evernote had endured those a few months ago, which is why I mentioned it. 'traceroute' shows 85ms to www.evernote.com from here, but it begins slowing down to that rate within ntt.net before it hits Evernote's server.

 

Perhaps it is shard-specific. I am currently running a sync – which is taking forever but at least isn't terminating before it does anything – yet it's getting timeouts during that process similar to this (two of them so far during this sync):

 
  Version: Evernote Mac 5.5.2 (402634)   Locale: en-US       OS: 10.9.4   WebKit: 537.77.4  WebCore: 537.77.4 Username: ...    Email: ...Mac Model: MacBookPro10,1 CPU Type: IntelCPU Count: 8CPU Speed: 2.700000 GHz      RAM: 16.000000 GB     Date: 2014-07-23 19:46:44 +0000error = "Error Domain=NSURLErrorDomain Code=-1001 \"The request timed out.\" UserInfo=0x6180002f8280 {NSUnderlyingError=0x618000848b50 \"The request timed out.\", NSErrorFailingURLStringKey=https://www.evernote.com/shard/s55/notestore, NSErrorFailingURLKey=https://www.evernote.com/shard/s55/notestore, NSLocalizedDescription=The request timed out.}";
 
If "shard/s55" identifies a particular shard (i.e. discrete segment of the database), then perhaps it is shard-specific. Searching my sync activity log, evidently I've been getting timeouts on (only) that shard between 2014-07-22 09:49:46 (yesterday) and 2014-07-23 15:42:19 (now).
 
That raises the possibility that they only record outages or degradations in service on their status page that impact their systems site-wide. It would be really useful if they would also post notifications along the lines of "be advised that we are experiencing system issues that may affect access response times for a small percentage of our users." That might at least help those of us who understand how networking functions from wasting a bunch of time trying to figure that out by exclusion.
 
I just now seem to have completed my first successful Evernote client sync – it took 15 minutes, but at least it finished. Either I got lucky or Evernote is reading these things and doing stuff behind the scenes. If so, I'll gladly take that! :)
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I can't open a support ticket. Here's what their submission form looks like after two minutes. I suppose I could go through the process of trying to find a phone number... 

 

rdj_1032.jpg

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  • 2 weeks later...

Same problem here. For last 3 weeks I've not been able to access Evernote via web interface at intermettent times. Sometimes I can access Evernote via web interface just fine. Other times it takes 5+ minutes to draw the page. And yet other times I cannot get logged in at all.

 

As suggested I will file a trouble ticket.

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Howdy, Scott:

 

This is the ISSUE that led to my EN WIN desktop calamity that you posted me about... EN support claimed it to be a SYNCH bug with the WIN EN desktop app.

 

 

SUCCESS: UNABLE TO REINSTALL | ERROR: "Already Installed by Another User"

https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/64641-success-unable-to-reinstall-error-already-installed-by-another-user/

 

 

Thanks for your comment.

 

 

Alan

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  • 4 weeks later...

Sorry to revive the relatively dead, but this is really frustrating. Facing the same issue as @rdj999 keen to know if anybody has a fix. Both my MacBooks are unable to sync, my iPad seems to have issues too. For some reason my Android phone seems to be able to use Evernote smoothly. The web version is hopeless - doesn't even load.

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Sorry to revive the relatively dead, but this is really frustrating. Facing the same issue as @rdj999 keen to know if anybody has a fix. Both my MacBooks are unable to sync, my iPad seems to have issues too. For some reason my Android phone seems to be able to use Evernote smoothly. The web version is hopeless - doesn't even load.

I would like to try to help.  Not sure I can get you where you need to be.

 

-Check your internet service to make sure you have good connectivity to your Macs and iPad.

-Have you tried the uninstall then reinstall of Evernote Client yet?  It takes a few minutes, but sometimes it fixes things.  *Make sure to back up your system and your Evernote Notes before uninstalling.  *Also, make sure you use a good app to clean the leftovers of EN off the machine after the uninstall.  I have found AppCleaner to be an efficient tool for this.

-Download the Latest Version of the Evernote App from evernote.com, not the App Store, and reinstall.

 

If none of that works, try the support ticket route, but Support will likely have you do the exact same thing before they take further action anyway.  Take note to the length of time this has been an issue and still occurring.  Use caution.  Don't fully rely on EN just yet.  Save your stuff elsewhere too!

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  • 2 months later...

I have been having problems with Evernote for several week also. I sign into the web site but then cannot get into my notes. I save items in my browser but am when I open the Evernote application in Windows 8 it does not seem to be able to synch. It is getting frustrating.

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I have been having problems with Evernote for several week also. I sign into the web site but then cannot get into my notes. I save items in my browser but am when I open the Evernote application in Windows 8 it does not seem to be able to synch. It is getting frustrating.

 

Take  a look at this issue: https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/71001-getting-cant-connect-to-server-error-message-on-windows-app/page-2#entry312045 It may be what you need to resolve your issue. 

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