Performance for Evernote 7.2 for Mac - slow :-(

[prefon1 2]

Hi - 

I use Evernote for Mac and I generally love it but it's gotten really slow.  When I'm typing notes I get the spinning wheel and I'm not having this problem with any other applications on my Macbook Pro.  Has anyone had this problem where when you are typing it just hangs and you get the spinning wheel on the mac?  Any ideas of how to fix it?

[tiappa 0]

l have the same problem - I've used Evernote for years with out a problem and even paid for premium. but for the last year or so my Evernote is so slow that it's almost unusable at times. I get the pinwheel constantly just typing and doing small things like changing fonts or cut and paste, both with the app on my Mac Pro and with the online version on a different laptop all together. 

Not sure what to do because I no longer have premium and can't get tech support.

[DTLow 5,736]

Standard troubleshooting is as a first step, reboot your Mac

The extreme solution is completely remove Evernote; app, database, ...
The app AppCleaner is recommended for this
Reinstall, login and the database will be rebuilt from the servers

Warning, the rebuild doesn't include Local Notebooks or unsync'd notes.

[tiappa 0]

Thanks @DTLow . I will try the extreme solution once again, however, I originally had trouble with the app on my old laptop and since then have installed the app on my new laptop and continued with the same problems. And I also experience the same problems when accessing the online version on different computers. Could there be a problem with my account since it's obviously not a computer problem?

 

[kallitt 3]

I am having the same issue on a brand new Macbook Pro. 

[balanyo 0]

Same issue.... If I could get back all the time I've wasted in the past 8-9 years trying to find out what's wrong with EN, I could go on a nice long vacation :-)

These suggestions about "rebuild & resync database" manually might help in some cases, but to be honest it shouldn't be part of the standard routine while using software one pays for. This is not linux, and not the 90s where people are happily hacking away.. Just do a core, simple, functional product and expand if necessary the features but don't overdo it. Just compare EN to slack, spotify, chrome, PS etc.. And try to learn something..

[tracycmaddox 0]

Same issue for me as well.  I remember this happened a few years ago and they fixed it.  Has anyone had their problem with this resolved?

 

[Push to Start 0]

I've been having this same performance issue for over 12 months. I see the spinning wheel every time i try to type anything. Evernote, PLEASE FIX THIS.  This is basic user experience. I don't care about any sophisticated features if you can't address the basic note-taking use case.  Yesterday, I switched to using Msft Word to type out a draft because of my Evernote performance issues.  I've recently installed Msft OneNote because i can't take it anymore. I've been a user since 2011, so it's a bummer it has come to this. 

[luckman212 165]

Performance is bad. I have 9,160 notes on a 16GB core i7 mac with an SSD. Just doing a simple search gives me a beachball for about 3-4 seconds, and then a weird subset of results is shown in the note list. I have to wait an additional 3 seconds for the window to refresh again with the "real" results. I have gotten used to this but it is such a time sink. It's faster sometimes to open a browser and search google than to search my local database, which is really sad.

[tiappa 0]

I found that some of the notes I use most often had many "conflicting modification" whole duplicates of the same note included below the original - this eventually made the notes incredibly long and heavy, when I erased all the duplicates those particular notes became much faster and easier to work with. 

[chip_s 0]

I have this problem too.  I see the spinning baseball all the time.  It has almost become unusable.  I have premium support and they have been of limited help with multiple tickets.  Reinstall, send logs, wait, no real improvement.  I've started using one note and I'm considering a complete migration because this issue has existed for 6 months or more.  I don't think they have much of a development team left, because each release has more problems than the previous one.

[Lori Thayer 0]

Sad to hear others are having this issue. I've been an Evernote user for a long time and have over 30k notes. I was thinking that must be the problem but seeing all of your posts clearly that isn't it. Over the last year I have been using Evernote less as it's become such a heavy application and it's too expensive for me to run while I work. I need a feature in it today but the performance is so poor I'll be avoiding it going forward.

[luckman212 165]

The crazy thing is, on my system with close to 10,000 notes, querying the SQLite db that holds all this info takes just 1/10th of a second.  So EN is somehow introducing a huge amount of lag in either parsing or whatever they are doing - but the delay is not related to the size of the data or database technology itself.

It used to be fast (EN ver 5 was the last one I remember that was very pleasant to use, very fast UI and no lag when searching, switching notes, etc). No idea what the hell they did to destroy this but EVERYTHING in EN takes 2-3 seconds minimum, sometimes 5-6, or more where you are just staring at nothing. Why can't this be worked on??

$ time sqlite3 "/path/to/my/LocalNoteStore.sqlite" 'select * from ZENNOTE' >/dev/null

real    0m0.131s
user    0m0.119s
sys     0m0.009s

 

[DTLow 5,736]

12 minutes ago, luckman212 said:

querying the SQLite db that holds all this info takes just 1/10th of a second.

This is my experience too, and I'm expecting # of notes is not an issue.
There's something else going on.

I experience occasional beach balls, but generally Evernote is working well for me.  
I'm not seeing the lags reported above

[Michael Vinocur 0]

We are using Evernote as a platform for scans of all our paper documents on Evernote Business and it is a critical software to our business. Unfortunately, performance on many of our Macs has become so sluggish that I really am considering changing platforms. We started putting 32 GB of RAM on all our machines a couple of years ago which seemed to help performance, but even that doesn't seem to work.

Given some of the recently concerning news reports regarding Evernote as a company, I would think they would want to throw real resources at this performance problem before we all start jumping ship. The fact that no one from the company has chimed in here is particularly concerning.

[luckman212 165]

Is anyone from EN listening to this? Is any work being done to address the horrid performance? I am just getting so frustrated with EN. I know everyone is leaving/getting fired or whatever. The world's ending at EN etc etc says all the blogs. But until I see a "Sorry, we're closing down" post on the frontpage, I expect things to still be fixed and work as long as we are paying for this product. Having to wait 10 seconds for search results to appear in my EN window is NOT acceptable.

[DTLow 5,736]

32 minutes ago, luckman212 said:

Is anyone from EN listening to this?

You're posting in a user discussion forum. 

To contact Evernote Support

• All accounts       Twitter @evernotehelps
• Paid Accounts    Contact Evernote Support 

[luckman212 165]

1 minute ago, DTLow said:

This is a user discussion forum. 

To contact Evernote Support

• All accounts       Twitter @evernotehelps
• Paid Accounts    Contact Evernote Support 

HAHHAHAHAHAHhHAhhahahahHahahahahahahahh. I think I'll go jam toothpicks into my eyes instead

[DTLow 5,736]

56 minutes ago, luckman212 said:

HAHHAHAHAHAHhHAhhahahahHahahahahahahahh. I think I'll go jam toothpicks into my eyes instead

I don't understand.

I pay for the enhanced support; and often they have a solution for the issue
if not, at least I know the issue is logged

[luckman212 165]

31 minutes ago, DTLow said:

I don't understand.

Sorry you didn't understand my post. I know it was subtle. Let me explain how EN support works now, since they seem to have outsourced the entire operation to some sort of weird volunteer group.  The last 3 support requests I've sent in were promptly replied to by people who started off by saying

Quote

"Hello, 
This is <DRONE>, an Evernote Certified Consultant and member of the Expertise Network. Experts are experienced Evernote users who assist the Support Staff by helping to solve issues that fellow Evernote users experience while using Evernote. I am not affiliated with Evernote and have no access to your account or your personal information."

So these are not EN employees, and probably have no access to internal bugtracking database (if such a thing even exists anymore?) and surely no access to meaningfully interact with developers who might actually fix anything. They then proceed to ignore most of my very detailed bug reports and regurgitate canned responses at me. It's all incredibly frustrating and in the end, a complete waste of time.

So yeah, sorry but if that's the kind of support I get as a PAYING customer for almost a decade... no thanks. I'll stick with the toothpicks in the eyes.

Quote

I pay for the enhanced support; and often they have a solution for the issue
if not, at least I know the issue is logged

Hahahahahahahahhhhhhhhhh.

[DTLow 5,736]

4 minutes ago, luckman212 said:

So these are not EN employees,

Confirmed.  The first level support is outsourced to this support company.  They handle the majority of issues or escalate to Evernote internal support.

[luckman212 165]

Well my experience has been horrible. There is no "escalation" to speak of. Cases simply get auto-closed with no resolution, no followup, no bugreports getting logged anywhere, and new releases coming out with more new bugs, and no fixes for the old ones that have been sitting there for years.

[Lorraine94588 1]

I am a paying customer who has been suffering with this issue for several years.  I am a software engineer and I use EN to track my daily work.  I like to select text, change font, colors, etc. It is how I think.  The notes slow down after abut two weeks worth of daily note taking.  I have been thru two new macbooks, with the same exact results.  A few years ago I even had a case open and they could see with me where it was hogging CPU.  They told me at the time that they could not support notes greater than  a certain size (I think it was 30K characters) and basically closed the case.   

I am starting to look for a different product and will cancel my subscription.

 

[jimwheeler 0]

I am using Evernote as a repository for my masters studies. Performance is appalling and it is seriously affecting my productivity. I can't use it for the purpose intended. Almost every time I go to write, I get the spinning wheel. Do EN not monitor these forums for ideas on how to improve their product? Very disappointed. 

[shuwn 0]

I have the same issue, My MacBook pro is 2018 2.6 GHz Intel Core i7, 32 GB 2400 MHz DDR4

But my EN is very lag, if there are more than five pictures. It is seriously affecting my productivity.

I don't understand what happened.☹️

[Chris Kimber 0]

Using a MacBook Air with latest version of Evernote app, i frequently get the spinning ball when adding to an existing note. It's happening so much now it's making me question renewing my subscription. Is there anything i can do to reduce this slow performance?

[frhtmst 4]

I already switched to bear app a week ago. I tried so much, spend too much energy for EN but looks like they don't as much as I do.

[MisterPetkus 3]

Has anyone experienced any improvements at all since the last posting?

As of now, I'm running Evernote 7.8 on a Mac Pro with 64G RAM.  It is often intolerably slow.  Especially if the note contains a PDF.

My group uses this in a professional environment for thousands of notes.  This solution no longer seems tenable.

edit: Thought I'd add I have an SSD and have already done a complete reinstall...

 

[tuqqer 1]

Well this is a scary thread. I just got back into EN after years elsewhere, and am in love with the Reminders feature, which allows me to use EN as a tickler file app for sales. But the idea of EN eventually slowing down to a crawl doesn't look good. And it sounds like support isn't addressing this. 

If any of you use EN mainly as a sales tool for its tickler system, let me know if you have an alternative. 

[jacobconroy75 0]

Yes, this is a scary thread. I am a paying "hardcore" Evernote user. Everything that matters in my life and business is recorded within. Been at it for years.

My 2017 Macbook Pro is away for a keyboard repair. So, today I bought a new 2018 Macbook Pro to tide me over while I wait (I needed another for my I.T. business anyway). Brand new computer running OS X 10.14.1. When I signed in to Evernote and synced I experienced the absolutely unusable scrolling lag for notes that contain pictures. My 2017 laptop did not present this issue.

So, is there a fix? I am not interested in using "low resolution" settings. If the next update will resolve this problem I'm happy to wait. However, Evernote had better speak up here and explain the situation if they would like me to be patient.

I understand that "stuff happens". But.....unacceptable. Dearest Evernote. You DO have competitors. Shall I look into them?

 

 

[twf 4]

I'm so glad to find this forum thread.  Ever since moving over to my new iMac and Mojave, the Evernote desktop won't stop having the spinning wheel.  It can become completely unusable about 70 percent of the time.  If I force quit and try to restart, it will say that there is a problem with the application loading ... but will eventually load.  And then I start the spinning wheel problem all over again.

Restarting the computer sometimes helps, not always.

Tech support just asks that I delete and reinstall the app.  Like it's that easy!!  You have to backup everything, then reload and reindex -- you're talking hours of your time gone with all of that.  And now I've seen several of you do just this, and yet it doesn't change a thing.  I just find the solution to be completely unworkable -- this is a paid app for me, a monthly subscription.  You'd think they could solve such a widespread problem.  

I wish there were a migratable app that did the same thing but worked.  I don't know if there is.  It's so disappointing.

[Joel Mac User 1]

Agree with all above. After seeing the trouble others have gone to - it's clearly not worth barking up this EN tree and giving up is the better option. Sorry EN developers - otherwise, great product but time to go and delete that premium subscription.

[rhworks 0]

The beachballs and massive typing lags are so bad now I do most of my real-time note-taking in the native Notes app and then later transfer to Evernote when its beachballs aren't as disruptive. Evernote loves beachballs, apparently.

Pro user since 2012 with only 116 notes (though some are biggish running threads). Macbook Pro Touchbar 2.9 GHz Intel Core i7 with gobs of free HD space and available ram. Systems and apps all up-to-date.

[twf 4]

I’m having to restart Evernote desktop about 3 times a day now to get temporary relief from these increasing issues.

[x1010 0]

I can confirm laggy scrolling experience on retina macbook pro 2019 (noticeable lag is in notes with pictures inside). If i use external non-retina display scrolling works without any issue.

[PinkElephant 8,072]

Can you tell more about your configuration (Mac, OS, EN version etc.) ? Are the critical notes loaded with pictures, or is there just one „needed“ to create a lag ?

Working on a Mac myself, no lagging, but as well only few notes with pictures.

[x1010 0]

my configuration:

Computer: MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2019); 2,3 GHz Intel Core i9; 32 GB 2400 MHz DDR4; Radeon Pro 560X 4 GB & Intel UHD Graphics 630 1536 MB

OS: 10.14.5 (18F203)

EN: Version 7.11 (457846 Direct), Editor: 69.1.8237 (1f0aea9)

I experience the lag in notes with pictures inside (one screenshot is enough to simulate lag). Notes without pictures works fine.

To simulate issue try to create few screenshots and paste it into note,  maximise EN to fullscreen and than try to scroll -> on build-in retina display it is not smooth (on external non retina it is smooth) 

i tried to disable automatic GPU switching and it doesn't helped. I also noticed high cpu usage during scrolling (goes up to 100% for evernote process)

 

[PinkElephant 8,072]

My config is pretty similar, just it is an i7 with Pro Vega 20 GPU. I pretty much use it in my office, so it is most of the time connected to a monitor.

Now I have tried all setups: With attached screen (HDMI through a Thunderbolt dock), USB-C-cable unattached, EN in large mode on the MBs retina, EN in full screen mode on the MBs retina. Behavior is quite similar between the setups, no significant lag.

What I observe is in notes that contain several pics, EN "builds" all pics at the same time when you open a note. Every pic starts from top to bottom to show, and if there is more than one visible, you can see that it will start on the second pic at the same moment as on the first one. But this takes only a blink, and then pics are displayed. During this initial phase, my CPU goes up to appr. 8% (in total, not only EN), after 2-3 sec it goes back to about 4%. Memory usage is low (just in the 4-6 GB range, since I have no opened much before testing).

I will just run a second test, this time unattaching the TB dock before starting up. Will be back ...

[PinkElephant 8,072]

Back from starting up on battery and without any cable attached.

Very similar, no lag, other behavior similar to what I have described before. CPU is going up to 10% max., coming down, maybe back up to 7-8% when scrolling notes with pics. Switching between notes with pics make no difference. EN behaves the same whether on partial display, full screen or complete screen mode.

The notes I view have pics in the 2MB range, most of them 3-4 pics, one note has about 10 pics, one of them has even 12MB, all jpegs.

My stronger GPU should have nothing to do with showing the pics. In fact I doubt that it is even used in this scenario.

Conclusion: I am not able to replicate your situation, even though our setup is close to identical.

Maybe your best bet is give it a try with support.

[x1010 0]

Thanks for your help anyway. I uploaded screen recording video to show how i can see it. It is no big issue for me, maybe it will improve in future release of drivers/software updates. I tried it on different mac and it works as expected. So it is probably issue in drivers or something else on my machine.

[PinkElephant 8,072]

Thanks for the video. I have not tried in dark mode, maybe this makes the difference.

[MisterPetkus 3]

I believe this particular problem is somehow related to an interplay between Evernote and Mac desktop OS X display drivers/graphics system.

The problem is extremely laggy in-line (in-note) display of PDFs and other embedded docs (Word, PP, etc.)

It's so laggy (constant pin-wheeling) as to render Evernote almost completely useless as a serious productivity tool.

The catch is that this is not an issue at all on any Mac laptop I've tested with - including an older, underpowered Air.

The laggy issue is on a fully spec'd Mac Pro (late 2013 cylinder model) with dual GPUs.

I've completely given up hope that this issue will be resolved.  It's been ongoing over many revisions.

 

[MisterPetkus 3]

Took a quick screen capture.  I wish it also grabbed that damned pinwheel. Aside from the slowness rendering a PDF, it's nearly impossible to scroll through a doc in-line. I'm trying to do that near the end of the capture.  This is not an issue on my mac air...

[PinkElephant 8,072]

Weird ...

Have no chance to test, it is just me and my shiny MacBook Pro 😎 And as I’ve said above, I could not even reproduce the lagging there (will try it again tomorrow with dark mode).

What OS and app version do you run on your MacPro ?

[MisterPetkus 3]

Hi PinkElephant - I don't believe you will be able to reproduce the problem on your MacBook. I never experience these issues on any of my Mac laptops.

Everything is the latest and greatest on my MacPro.

Cheers...

[PinkElephant 8,072]

@x1010 Just tried it in dark mode on the MBPs Retina display.

Maybe it lags a little more than in normal mode, but far from unworkable. This is more visible when text and pics are mixed, which creates more black area around the pics. But this is just a feeling of taking longer. CPU usage is just the same as before.

So from my tests there must be another factor with your MBP that is not taking effect with mine.

[PinkElephant 8,072]

@MisterPetkus Sorry to hear that. There are some quite downgrading names for the MacPro, but I like the design. Plain black, simple and different.

Maybe you want to add a cheese grater, gen.2 soon. At least it will have a better expandability, beside having all the power one may (ever) need.

[Hackett Lai 1]

It's 2019 and it's still slow as hell, once you have image insert in the note, it will start lagging during scroll.....
come on are they even listing to us?

[DTLow 5,736]

1 hour ago, Hackett Lai said:

come on are they even listing to us?

You're posting in a user discussion forum?

You can contact Evernote Support at https://www.evernote.com/SupportLogin.action

[twf 4]

I have been able to improve Evernote's performance but only after my Mac OS was wiped and reloaded, and I also removed Evernote and re-downloaded the app.  I do think there may be issues with the last 6 months of Mojave updates related to the forthcoming Catalina.  And starting fresh (as annoying as it was) did seem to help Evernote a lot.  However, I still have to force quit Evernote every 24 hours and re-start if I haven't re-started my iMac in 24 hours.  There is something about Evernote that gets caught up in a "clogged cache" -- or something like that, which gives me the spinning wheel and loads down my entire machine if I don't re-start Evernote periodically.  

The other problem with the program is that it does use a tremendous amount of RAM.  This needs to be addressed.  It uses a higher amount than Photoshop.  And I think this may be one of the top issues affecting Evernote.