Constant Freezing in Evernote

[white_wolf 4]

I am using Evernote for past 1.5 years and have around 2200 notes in my database. But, one thing that is really troubling me is the constant freezing happening in Evernote. Sometimes it happens while opening a note or sometimes when I am just typing a word, it suddenly freezes and I have to wait for 20-30 seconds before it works again. Many times I had to force close the application because it just became unresponsive. Is having huge no. of notes a reason for this? Are there any solutions or workaround for this? 

Details:

System: Windows 8.1

Evernote version: 6.15.4.7934 (307934) Public (CE Build ce-53.4.6770)

[DTLow 5,736]

3 minutes ago, white_wolf said:

Is having huge no. of notes a reason for this?

imho   You don't have a huge no.of notes, and the product/service can handle it.
50,000+ is getting into the huge definition.

[white_wolf 4]

1 hour ago, DTLow said:

imho   You don't have a huge no.of notes, and the product/service can handle it.
50,000+ is getting into the huge definition.

Then what might be the reasons for this? Any solutions? I am using the latest version of Evernote and have turned off auto sync too

[gazumped 11,661]

Hi.  I have 44.5K notes and have a similar freezing issue on Windows 10.  If you've had a fair amount of traffic on the database - adding and deleting notes - it's possible the index needs rebuilding.  Have a read through this (long) thread - there are a few suggested fixes there...

 

 

 

[CalS 5,280]

3 hours ago, white_wolf said:

Then what might be the reasons for this? Any solutions? I am using the latest version of Evernote and have turned off auto sync too

Also,

1. Set your sync to 10 minutes or more under Tools - Options - Synchronization.
2. Set Automatically save edited note to 300 seconds or more under Tools - Options - Note.
3. Turn off Show context if it is enabled on the same Note panel in options.

You can always click on the sync button if you want to force a sync, or press F9.

[white_wolf 4]

10 hours ago, CalS said:

Also,

1. Set your sync to 10 minutes or more under Tools - Options - Synchronization.
2. Set Automatically save edited note to 300 seconds or more under Tools - Options - Note.
3. Turn off Show context if it is enabled on the same Note panel in options.

You can always click on the sync button if you want to force a sync, or press F9.

I have already done the other two options before barring no. 2. Now I have set automatically save edited note to 300 seconds. I hope this somehow solves the issue.

[white_wolf 4]

11 hours ago, gazumped said:

Hi.  I have 44.5K notes and have a similar freezing issue on Windows 10.  If you've had a fair amount of traffic on the database - adding and deleting notes - it's possible the index needs rebuilding.  Have a read through this (long) thread - there are a few suggested fixes there...

 

 

 

Thanks @gazumped. I have tried few fixes as mentioned in the thread. I will check if it solves the issue.

[gazumped 11,661]

You're welcome.  Let us know if you get any success!!  Good luck... ?

[Ralph77 44]

@white_wolf Just wondering if you managed to solve the issue?

[Ralph77 44]

On 10/31/2018 at 5:07 AM, CalS said:

Also,

1. Set your sync to 10 minutes or more under Tools - Options - Synchronization.
2. Set Automatically save edited note to 300 seconds or more under Tools - Options - Note.
3. Turn off Show context if it is enabled on the same Note panel in options.

You can always click on the sync button if you want to force a sync, or press F9.

OK, I've tried these to no avail, and this random freezing, which seems to happen for up to 10 or 15 seconds, sometimes followed almost immediately by a second or even third freeze, is driving me crazy! I've also reinstalled to no avail.

I guess I'll have to move on to looking at the thread @gazumped mentioned above 😞

[gazumped 11,661]

@Ralph77 - if you have Task Manager open,  check the Processes tab and click on the Disk heading to sort activity from most to least.  Watch what happens to Evernote when it hangs.  In my experience now,  I can add a new note,  and then go to attach a file and find that Evernote just jumped to the top of the ranking with a much higher disk access score than anything else.

Creating a test note got me an 8-second freeze whilst (presumably) Evernote updated the database and index(es);  deleting it afterward got me another similar freeze with activity up to 12.7% - presumably as the system deleted the data I just created.  I added some more Readtboost memory to my system recently with 30GB of USB3 stick,  and that has helped.  (My Dell already has the max onboard memory it can support at 8GB.)  Currently still looking at an SSD,  a custom-build desktop or a high(er)-end laptop for more resources!

[jefito 5,589]

2 hours ago, gazumped said:

My Dell already has the max onboard memory it can support at 8GB

...and you're giving 1/6th of it away to Chromme. Sheesh, close a few tabs, willya?  

2 hours ago, gazumped said:

I added some more Readtboost memory to my system

Did you forget to configure HIMEM.SYS? Very important, you know...

[Ralph77 44]

12 hours ago, gazumped said:

I added some more Readtboost memory to my system recently with 30GB of USB3 stick,  and that has helped.  (My Dell already has the max onboard memory it can support at 8GB.)  Currently still looking at an SSD,  a custom-build desktop or a high(er)-end laptop for more resources!

My system is pretty high spec, it's running an intel i7 7700HQ with 32GB RAM and an SSD, so the issues I'm experiencing aren't likely to be hardware related.

I tried the create-new-note test you suggested. While doing so, EN was even hanging just for a couple of seconds as I was moving my mouse over the seven dropdown menus at the top. When I created the new note, EN did rise to the top of the list in Task Manager, but not for too long, and no longer than I would have reasonably expected.

Additional Issue 1) However, soon after I attached a PDF, the EN screen disappeared. I have seen this happen once before, also recently (and that time it wasn't when attaching a file, I was simply typing within a note). This time and last time the issue was the same - I could not re-open EN, then when I tried to re-start it after having force closed it through Task manager, it kept popping up with a small dialog "Evernote is not ready to accept clips. Please open the main application and try again." I then had to go back into Task Mgr and force-close "Evernote Tray Application" before I could re-start EN properly.

Additional Issue 2) Also a few times on Windows 10 bootup I've had EN report that the last time EN closed, it had done so unexpectedly (which I wasn't aware of, and could indicate that it didn't close gracefully on the last shutdown - this was an acknowledged issue in a previous version, but I thought that bug had been squashed).

Anyway, I don't know if the additional issues and the hanging are related.

There is one thing that I feel I would like to try before moving on to other troubleshooting, and that is a UEFI/BIOS downgrade, simply because I had no issues with EN before I upgraded the laptop's firmware on 30th December.

[gazumped 11,661]

6 hours ago, Ralph77 said:

intel i7 7700HQ with 32GB RAM and an SSD

Suddenly I feel very depressed 😏

6 hours ago, Ralph77 said:

soon after I attached a PDF, the EN screen disappeared

I've had sudden shutdowns too - not often,  but I'm very occasionally aware that Evernote isn't 'there' any more for no reason that I could fathom.  That in itself is worth a Support ticket - it would be nice to stop that happening!  Plus yes,  after that happens I'll as often as not have to kill the running Evernote processes before I can start a new instance,  and the first sign I get of a successful restart is the Fatal Error window.  Complete and send that,  and the app will come back without a problem.

You're on your own with a BIOS downgrade - that's well outside my comfort zone;  but if you do go ahead,  please let us know how you went about it,  and whether there's a good outcome!

Final suggestions -

1. I have flirted with a second Basic account (running alongside my main account on desktop) so I can create new notes more quickly and then copy (drag/ drop) the day's note activity into the Premium account whenever I take a break.  That at least avoids freezes on new notes;  and when working on a particular project I can move those notes from Premium to Basic (depending on the content) and then edit in some peace.  Only drawback:  remembering to copy the notes across and then delete the originals to avoid duplicates.
    
2. Don't know whether it's been mentioned in this thread yet - is the good old "sync on demand" option.  It is possible to set Evernote to 'purge' (that's the slightly ominous term they use) "rarely viewed content" - any notes that haven't been accessed for X days - from the local database.  Notes are NOT removed from the server,  and are still available on demand,  but - like the mobile experience - the content has to be downloaded when you want to see the full note,  so there will be a longer wait time.  That's Tools > Options > Synchronization and tick 'show advanced options' to see the.. options.
   
   I tried this out when setting up a new laptop,  and my huge 20+GB database shrank to a few MB.  I want to keep regular local backups though,  and if the database isn't stored on my device,  there's nowhere to source the full content.  The only way I found to get out of that situation quickly was to recreate my local database from the server,  which took a couple of hours.  I don't recall any freezes while using it though.

PS @jefito,  I gave up worrying about himem.sys with Windows 98!  or do you have a secret hack for Windows 10? 😄 ... and I might have had about 10 tabs open - I get distracted easily.

 

[CalS 5,280]

15 hours ago, Ralph77 said:

My system is pretty high spec, it's running an intel i7 7700HQ with 32GB RAM and an SSD, so the issues I'm experiencing aren't likely to be hardware related.

Windows Home or Pro?

[Ralph77 44]

4 hours ago, CalS said:

Windows Home or Pro?

Home. If you think Pro would solve the issue I'd upgrade in a flash!

13 hours ago, gazumped said:

You're on your own with a BIOS downgrade - that's well outside my comfort zone;  but if you do go ahead,  please let us know how you went about it,  and whether there's a good outcome!

The BIOS downgrade procedure is very simple, at least it is with my GigaByte laptop, as I keep the old BIOS flash files specifically in case of this sort of thing happening. It's an automated process that's done from within Windows.

Sadly this turned out to be a red herring as it didn't fix the issue...

As soon as I started EN for the first time today, I waited till it had finished its sync, then I created a new note, typed some text. Then I over-typed the default note text in the title bar and as I was doing that EN froze for about 10 secs.

When the freeze happens, you don't even see the mouse cursor if you move it while in EN. And if you navigate away from EN, you cannot make it re-appear by navigating back to it, until the freeze stops.

Returning to this note about three minutes later, I changed the title text, and while doing so, EN froze for about 15 secs.

Got me wondering if the freezing is more likely while typing Title text than body text? So I tried it a third time - and yep, same thing happened again!

I then tried it again by starting a second new note, and was not able to immediately replicate the issue in that note, until I returned to it a few moments later and started typing in the title bar, when it froze again.

Can others perhaps run a few tests and see if it's more prevalent while typing within the title bar than within the note itself? You may have to type say 50 or 60 characters within the title bar before the freeze occurs.

13 hours ago, gazumped said:

I have flirted with a second Basic account (running alongside my main account on desktop) so I can create new notes more quickly and then copy (drag/ drop) the day's note activity into the Premium account whenever I take a break.  That at least avoids freezes on new notes

This tends to suggest that it's an account issue (rather than a 'local' PC issue) that is only affecting Premium users?

14 hours ago, gazumped said:

Don't know whether it's been mentioned in this thread yet - is the good old "sync on demand" option.  It is possible to set Evernote to 'purge' (that's the slightly ominous term they use) "rarely viewed content" - any notes that haven't been accessed for X days - from the local database.

From having tried one of the initial suggestions in this thread of setting sync to a very high value, eg 15 mins, I really don't feel that this is a sync issue as such.

My next test will be to disconnect from internet, reboot, and then see if the freeze happens while creating a new note while offline. Will report back on that soonish...

I also wanted to try creating a new note on my old laptop which, due to disuse, still has EN v6.5.4 installed. But it will not sync - log shows error msg "Sync failed due to unexpected problem server side". I wonder if this version may have been deliberately disabled, being so old?

Nevertheless I tried creating a new note as WAS able to get it to freeze while typing new text within the title bar - but only for a couple of seconds, not for 10-15 seconds. So for all I know, this may always have been the case with that old version, and it would be hard to notice if you weren't really looking out for it, being only a couple of seconds.

[Ralph77 44]

17 minutes ago, Ralph77 said:

My next test will be to disconnect from internet, reboot, and then see if the freeze happens while creating a new note while offline.

Answer: yes, it does still happen even when using EN offline.

Also, in case I didn't mention it yet, the freezes also happen when just mousing around within EN, eg. when clicking on various notes as you move down the Note List. So, no need to be actually typing anything at all. I feel this points more strongly to it not being a sync issue.

[CalS 5,280]

53 minutes ago, Ralph77 said:

Home. If you think Pro would solve the issue I'd upgrade in a flash!

No guarantees.  I use a 6 year old Lenovo x230 with 8GB memory and an SSD running Windows 10 Pro 1809.   I disable as much of the system level BS as I can.  41k notes, 19 GB data base.  Half of my notes are PDFs.  

I don’t have response issues.  For whatever the reason may be.  Could it be Pro, no clue, but it is a difference.  

[Ralph77 44]

8 hours ago, CalS said:

No guarantees

OK, you got off on a technicality there! In other words, I've now upgraded to Windows 10 Pro... but this issue still exists 😕 I was hopeful for a while, because as I typed my first note after rebooting, it went really well. But then I navigated to another note and started typing some new text into that one and it happened again. Oh well - as you may have guessed, I was toying with the idea of upgrading to Pro anyway, so no harm done 😉

I forgot to mention - when the freeze occurs, if you just keep typing as normal, without trying to navigate away from EN, no text is actually lost - when it unfreezes, 10 or 15 seconds later, all the typed text will appear. So in this sense, it's not a real program freeze in the traditional sense - but more of a video freeze, if that makes sense?

I see there is a minor update available, so I can update from 6.17.4 to 6.17.6. I'll let you know if that fixes it...

EDIT (5 minutes later, and the answer is...) - Nope, it didn't fix it.

[gazumped 11,661]

Hi again

11 hours ago, Ralph77 said:

This tends to suggest that it's an account issue (rather than a 'local' PC issue) that is only affecting Premium users?

Don't think so - except in so far as Premium Windows users are likely to build up a greater number of notes / larger database size more quickly and (maybe) therefore run into this issue sooner and with more gusto.  My Basic account foray (which is ongoing) was to compare the performance of a more-or-less 'empty' account,  with a huge one.  -It was a suggestion by the then Evernote tech staff to one of our earlier Guru members some while back that she should start a second account after her first got very large and started freezing.

@EdH has also waxed lyrical about the deficiencies of Evernote's Windows database design.  You'll notice that Mac users don't seem to have the same issues,  and on a Mac the "database" is actually a folder of separate note files rather than one humongous repository.

11 hours ago, Ralph77 said:

From having tried one of the initial suggestions in this thread of setting sync to a very high value, eg 15 mins, I really don't feel that this is a sync issue as such.

Again the sync on demand option is not about sync issues,  but about database size.  If my 20-odd GB database shrinks to 100MB or less,  I'm assuming there's correspondingly less data to shuffle around on my hard drive,  therefore less disk access.

-And like @CalS I went for ages without any noticeable freezing issues - I was cautious about approaching 40,000 notes because that's where our old colleague had problems some years ago:  but when I passed that I didn't immediately hit a wall.  I'm now up to 45,164 notes though and things are getting more annoying...  😕

[CalS 5,280]

5 hours ago, Ralph77 said:

I see there is a minor update available, so I can update from 6.17.4 to 6.17.6. I'll let you know if that fixes it...

Don't know what else to say, other than maybe somehow special twinkle dust got sprinkled on my PC.    Only other things I do, as stated before, are tune off any extraneous processes (for me).  Things like MS's sort indexer and the like.  Sync is set to 5 minutes, Automatically save edited notes is set to 5 minutes, and no context.  Two monitor set up with EN full screen on the right monitor, side list view with the left panel closed.  Can't think of anything else.

 Hopefully I won't hit the 45k issue that @gazumped references, but that's about a year off at the current pace of adding notes.  Sitting at 40,701 as I type.  Hope you find something.

[gazumped 11,661]

Hmmn.  Since I raised the question of a second account just let me update it here - my idea was to run it as a 'to-do' center to build up a library of work in process that I could archive back to the main account on completion of each task for longer term reference.  Over time this would make the Basic account my 'action center' and the current Premium account my long-term storage.

Using four Eisenhower-derived personal categories I'd tag each note NOW / Soon / sometime / whenever (you have to imagine a Gallic shrug on that last one) and share the notebook with my main account.  I'd use Filterize in the main account to update a dashboard with items (forinstance) with a reminder date of today OR with a tag of NOW - and I could share my dashboard(s) back to the 2nd account so they could be accessed whichever one was in use.  (There would be rather more categories,  but that'll do for an illustration.)

However.  Now I get it to the state where I can share the notebook to my main account,  I find that my carefully-tagged notes came across nicely,  but not -apparently- access to those shared tags.  (Yes I checked the share had edit permissions and have gone back to edit the notes a bit to sync changes...)  

Don't know whether this is Evernote's answer to complaints about seeing shared-in tags on individual accounts,  or just a sync delay.  Things,  as I said,  are ongoing.  I'll continue trying options and if I can get this to work,  I'll boast - er,  post - about it in another thread...  The moral here though is - running two accounts is not necessarily going to be a viable long term option.

I'm currently conscious of breaking my own basic rule #1 - don't get distracted setting up work systems and forget actually doing the work!  After my headache goes away I might try something more constructive.  🤕

[Ralph77 44]

10 hours ago, gazumped said:

Again the sync on demand option is not about sync issues,  but about database size.  If my 20-odd GB database shrinks to 100MB or less,  I'm assuming there's correspondingly less data to shuffle around on my hard drive,  therefore less disk access.

I'm a bit sceptical that the issue has anything to do with database size, because mine is quite small - currently I have just 1284 notes, and when exported into .enex format, this occupies 108MB, much of which would be the image content (jpg, png etc). So I'm not what you'd classify as a power user by any means! Also remember this is a high-spec laptop with an SSD.

5 hours ago, gazumped said:

Since I raised the question of a second account just let me update it here - my idea was to run it as a 'to-do' center to build up a library of work in process that I could archive back to the main account on completion of each task for longer term reference.  Over time this would make the Basic account my 'action center' and the current Premium account my long-term storage.

I don't want to setup a second account just yet - but despite my small database size, I agree it would be an interesting test to do and will bear it in mind, but will try a few other things first and report back if any success. (Eg. login to Windows from a Test account instead of my main account; update EN on my old laptop and see if the same issue occurs or not.)

[gustavgi 308]

Only thing that has worked for me and my 30.000+ notes, when Evernote has started lagging in the past, is using Optimize Database under the Help menu if you press Help while holding the Ctrl-key.

[Ralph77 44]

1 hour ago, gustavgi said:

Optimize Database under the Help menu if you press Help while holding the Ctrl-key

Thanks for this tip - I had no idea there were extra options available by holding Ctrl. Unfortunately it did not fix the issue... however, I have had success by using EN from within a different Windows user account!

A while back I'd setup a 'Test' user with Admin privileges, since I was having an (unrelated and non-EN) issue with my scanner. So I logged into that account. As this was the first time EN had been run in that account, it took a little while to download all my notes. Since I only have <1300 notes, "a little while" was probably only about 5 minutes.

After the sync finished I created a new note, did the usual test by typing in the body and title fields, moused around the rest of my notes for a while, went back to the note, created another note... and there was no freezing at all.

My thoughts are that the issue could be Windows account-related, but it could also be due to the fact that the Test account has nothing running in the background that my main account does (eg. VPN, online backup, download manager, etc etc) so it's possible that there is some conflict happening. But as far as I know, I hadn't installed anything new that would be causing conflicts.

When I get the time I will try disabling various things like the VPN to see if this helps.

In the meantime, it would be helpful if others could perform a similar test, by trying EN on a different Windows user account. I realise that with a huge database size this might mean a big download due to the initial sync, but to circumvent this, perhaps you could try it out while offline (as my EN freezes even while offline)?

[gazumped 11,661]

More on this - 

1. A quick update on the separate account idea:  I wanted to use Filterize to manipulate notes in my Premium account and a notebook shared in to that account.  Unfortunately Filterize isn't able to manipulate notes from a shared account.  The guys there say I'd need two subscriptions to Filterize and duplicated 'recipes' to handle notes.  The fudge factor just went off the scale,  so I'm back to square one.
2. Interesting idea to try another Windows profile - I'll give this a shot over the next few days.  Real Life requires some attention though,  so it may take a little while.  Does occur to me that when installing software I usually take the 'this user only' option for security and kids access reasons,  so a new profile might be a tad limiting... The download issue can be overcome by copying the Databases folder to an external drive and then installing Evernote,  using the copied Databases folder in place of the original empty install version.  Don't know whether that could be counter-productive - bringing some old account 'cooties' with it (new Evernote technical term 😏).

[Ralph77 44]

1 hour ago, gazumped said:

I wanted to use Filterize to manipulate notes in my Premium account and a notebook shared in to that account.

Fascinating - I will never be such a power user that I'd need it, but I had no idea 3rd party add-ons existed for EN.

1 hour ago, gazumped said:

when installing software I usually take the 'this user only' option for security and kids access reasons,  so a new profile might be a tad limiting

I am the only user of this laptop and I think I chose whatever the default install option was, which I'd assume is "everyone" but maybe I'm wrong, because my Database folder is C:\Users\[user name]\Evernote\Databases. I'm a little confused though because the size of my normal account Databases folder is 357MB, but the same folder in the Test account is only 164MB. But if the actual database is the file with the extension .exb within that folder, then those are a very similar size.

1 hour ago, gazumped said:

Don't know whether that could be counter-productive - bringing some old account 'cooties' with it (new Evernote technical term 😏)

As in school, I think the possibility of cooties would be a potential risk, yes. I think that for the purpose of the test, it would be safe to pull out your ethernet cable shortly after the initial sync starts, then see if the issue exists while creating a new note, mousing around the Note List, anything that would normally create a freeze.

Although I have already tried uninstalling/reinstalling, I suspect that the uninstall didn't purge/delete my database, because all my notes came up real quick on the first run. Although @gustavgi's suggestion to Optimize Database didn't yield any improvement, I'm tempted to try another uninstall, and this time make sure the database folder has been removed. I'll give this a go tomorrow, as it's getting late here in Australia now... And when I do that, I think I will try installing an older version, I have 6.14.5.7671 so will initially try that one. The other thing I'll try is disabling everything in Task Manager's Start-up tab, it would make sense to try that first actually.

[gazumped 11,661]

And there's more on similar topics here - 

 

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,954]

On 1/27/2019 at 8:36 PM, Ralph77 said:

My thoughts are that the issue could be Windows account-related, but it could also be due to the fact that the Test account has nothing running in the background that my main account does (eg. VPN, online backup, download manager, etc etc) so it's possible that there is some conflict happening. But as far as I know, I hadn't installed anything new that would be causing conflicts.

I'm inclined toward the background activity explanation as well, as @CalS has suggested. I only say this because I generally don't have a freezing issue, with a modest-size database on an older Windows 7 machine. This morning I experienced it just as Ralph described: a display freeze for 10 seconds or so while I kept on typing, at the end of which my typing appeared. My antivirus (or something) was doing a background update at that time, and I'm fairly sure that that was the cause of the freeze, since I don't normally experience it. Not much experimental data here, but it does seem to point in the direction of background processes. Why does it only affect Evernote? Well, it doesn't. At such times browser tabs (Opera) load very slowly as well. I suspect that it may be the software one uses most, or uses at certain times, that is likely to "freeze" at those moments.

[Ralph77 44]

8 hours ago, gazumped said:

And there's more on similar topics here - 

Thanks - I just tried turning off Windows Defender 'Control Flow Guard' (CFG) per advice in that thread, but to no avail so I've re-enabled it.

1 hour ago, Dave-in-Decatur said:

I'm inclined toward the background activity explanation as well, as @CalS has suggested

I'm also so inclined, because when I found that when I disable everything from Task Manager's Start-up tab, the issue doesn't occur. Now I'm in the process of narrowing it down to find which is the culprit (and hoping this isn't a red herring - due to the somewhat intermittent nature of this fault, one could be deceived into thinking it's fixed, when it's really just lying in wait to pounce again when you least suspect!) But the fact that it doesn't fault when logged in as Test user is encouraging in this regard.

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,954]

I appreciate and admire your persistence! Do let us know if you find a specific culprit or two. It could prove very useful.

[jefito 5,589]

On 1/28/2019 at 7:38 AM, Ralph77 said:

I am the only user of this laptop and I think I chose whatever the default install option was, which I'd assume is "everyone" but maybe I'm wrong, because my Database folder is C:\Users\[user name]\Evernote\Databases. I'm a little confused though because the size of my normal account Databases folder is 357MB, but the same folder in the Test account is only 164MB. But if the actual database is the file with the extension .exb within that folder, then those are a very similar size.

Evernote installs for the currently logged in user, not for 'everyone'; that way, each logged in user can have their own Evernote data, kept separate from other users. The Evernote software is likely the same for all users, but user data isn't. This is now pretty common practice.

Moreover, if the same user has separate accounts, each one gets its own database, which is essentially the .exb related files file matching the account name, i.e., myaccount.exb, myaccount.exb.activitylog, etc. If you have an Attachments folder in your Databases folder, you may find that it's filled with a lot of files that are taking up space. They can be safely deleted, once you've shut down any applications that you've activated to edit/view any Evernote attachments, then Evernote itself. They are temporary files used by external programs for editing and viewing attachments; normally, Evernote will delete them automatically, but that process can fail.

[Ralph77 44]

On 1/30/2019 at 11:45 AM, Dave-in-Decatur said:

I appreciate and admire your persistence! Do let us know if you find a specific culprit or two. It could prove very useful.

As far as I can tell, the main culprit appears to be my password manager, Sticky Password. So far (and I emphasize so far) as long as I don't have it open in the background, I don't get freezing in EN. After I start Sticky Password, eventually I'll get a freeze of at least 10 seconds.

To a lesser extent, there's a possibility my Realtek Semiconductor audio may be causing minor issues lasting only a few seconds. The laptop comes with "Realtek HD Audio Manager" and "HD Audio Background Process" enabled in Start-up by default. This one is trickier to reproduce though, and so far I have not been able to reproduce a freeze at all in the Test account even with Realtek running.

I have not yet tried running Sticky Password in the Test account. That will be a test for tomorrow...

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,954]

Very interesting, and a little surprising. I wouldn't have thought a password manager would need to do a lot in the background; but what do I know?

[Ralph77 44]

OK, I've been able to confirm that when running Sticky Password in the background, EN freezes from time to time - even in my Test account in Windows. This is significant because until trying this, nothing would make EN freeze in the Test account. I'm therefore reasonably certain that this is the cause, at least in my case.

The first I noticed EN freezing was around 30/31 December, which was at least 10 days after the Sticky Password update to Build 8.2.1.226 - quite a long time not to have noticed any freeze, but then again I'm only a light EN user so I simply may not have encountered one. I've opened a support ticket with Sticky Password to as if they know about any issue, and asking how to downgrade to an earlier version.

@gazumped I don't suppose you use Sticky Password? Or have a Realtek sound card?

[gazumped 11,661]

I use Bitwarden for passwords - it's a browser extension with no active processes that I can see.  I do have a Realtek Card Reader Patch Tool running on my main laptop,  which led me to a Realtek USB 2.0 Card Reader.  Don't think that's a factor though,  because I have a backup laptop which also freezes.  I'll have a look into what other bits and pieces are attached to that.

[Ralph77 44]

Sticky Password support have no knowledge of any issues affecting EN, but they did point me to a tweak in SP settings that allows for the exclusion of any executables you want, so I've excluded all 7 .exe files in C:\Program Files (x86)\Evernote\Evernote and so far... (early days yet)... EN seems to be running fine. I'll keep using as normal and monitor over the next week or so.

Working on the assumption that the freeze issue is caused by a background process, it seems that whatever this background process is, the same process is used by different programs (in my case, presumably Sticky Password). I'm not technical, but perhaps it would a reasonable assumption that this process could be something reasonably common to many programs, eg. maybe the .NET framework, or whatever?

@gazumped whenever you have time, it would be great if you could use the same process of elimination - firstly disabling everything from Task Manager's Start-up tab to see if it resolves the issue? And assuming it does, to add back half of them, re-test, etc etc.

[gazumped 11,661]

16 hours ago, Ralph77 said:

@gazumped whenever you have time, it would be great if you could use the same process of elimination - firstly disabling everything from Task Manager's Start-up tab to see if it resolves the issue? And assuming it does, to add back half of them, re-test, etc etc.

Ugh.  Very much appreciate that you did all this,  but life is kinda full right now...  this could take a while...   ☺️

[Ralph77 44]

No probs at all @gazumped - I understand how 'life can get in the way' sometimes!

[gazumped 11,661]

Hmmn.  OK so it occurred to me that my 'backup' laptop would be a good candidate for a disabled startup session and I gave it a shot.  Everything except Evernote and some Windows stuff got turned off.  The laptop itself is running faster,  and I was cautiously optimistic:  until today when I had another shut-down for a few minutes when messing with tags and notebooks.  No obvious conflicts.  🤕

I'll give it another shot,  and I've posted a suggestion in the 6.18 release thread here https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/118709-evernote-for-windows-618-beta-1/#comment-53029 that it might be an idea to get pro-active with Windows users to determine the scale of the problem and (maybe) narrow down on causes.  I'm not overly hopeful though,  because it takes a lot of hutzpah for a company to go out and ask customers "got any problems you want to share?" - especially since some issues [though definitely not ours!] will likely be caused by users not maintaining their devices and software.

 

[Ralph77 44]

16 hours ago, gazumped said:

until today when I had another shut-down for a few minutes when messing with tags and notebooks

Thanks for trying this. Just to clarify: with regard to this "shut-down", I take it you are referring to a freeze affecting only EN, correct? (Rather than an EN crash, as has been discussed briefly further up ^ there; or a complete PC freeze.)

If it's the type of freeze I'm getting, I have never had one last a few minutes, in fact never longer than about 20 seconds, and any typing into EN I do during the freeze appears when it unfreezes, so it's not a complete application freeze in the usual sense, but some sort of a freeze of the video if that makes sense.

[gazumped 11,661]

8 hours ago, Ralph77 said:

I take it you are referring to a freeze affecting only EN, correct?

Yes,  sorry - got a bit carried away with the language there.  This was Evernote white-acreening and maxing out disk activity as shown in Task Manager.  I can't use Evernote at all during those periods - sometimes typing gets retained,  mostly it doesn't.  The search continues...

[fredhammersmith 53]

On 1/25/2019 at 1:34 PM, jefito said:

Did you forget to configure HIMEM.SYS? Very important, you know...

Can u guide me through this?

I'll do anything hat can speed things up.

I have close to 30K notes and I am one of the users complaining a lot about the slowness of Evernote.

 

[jefito 5,589]

56 minutes ago, fredhammersmith said:

On 1/25/2019 at 1:34 PM, jefito said:

Did you forget to configure HIMEM.SYS? Very important, you know...

Can u guide me through this?

Sorry -- that was a joke. HIMEM.SYS  from the days of DOS on PCs. It's been irrelevant for about twenty years or so, but I figured @gazumped would know about it.

[fredhammersmith 53]

54 minutes ago, jefito said:

Sorry -- that was a joke. HIMEM.SYS  from the days of DOS on PCs. It's been irrelevant for about twenty years or so, but I figured @gazumped would know about it.

Good old days!

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,954]

4 hours ago, jefito said:

5 hours ago, fredhammersmith said:

On 1/25/2019 at 1:34 PM, jefito said:

Did you forget to configure HIMEM.SYS? Very important, you know...

Can u guide me through this?

Sorry -- that was a joke. HIMEM.SYS  from the days of DOS on PCs. It's been irrelevant for about twenty years or so, but I figured @gazumped would know about it.

One word: DESQview.

[jefito 5,589]

3 hours ago, Dave-in-Decatur said:

One word: DESQview.

*shudder* Fortunately, only ever fooled around with it, but  never really needed to make it work -- it was pretty fragile, in my experience.

On the other hand, my beloved original Compaq Portable, bought with a hard summer's programming gig: dual 360K floppies (no hard drives, a 5MB drive was ~$5000), 512K RAM : boot from DOS disk in drive A, create a RAM drive and load the Lattice C compiler/linker and SEE text editor from drive B into the RAM drive, remove floppy from B and insert source code floppy... good to go. MS-DOS 1, no hi mem, no EMS, no directories, even.

[Ralph77 44]

5 hours ago, jefito said:

On the other hand, my beloved original Compaq Portable, bought with a hard summer's programming gig

And by "Portable", I assume this meant it could be easily transported, as long as you had access to a mule train... 🤣

It's been 7 days since I excluded Sticky Password's executable files from being accessible by EN, and in that time I have not experienced any more freezing.

I would love to hear some theories from the more experienced techies here - looking at all you Level 5s 😉 - as to what part of another program could affect EN in this way? Obviously not everyone who has this issue is a Sticky Password user, but I'm willing to lay $ on the table that there is some common aspect in this freezing issue, and that it probably lies in the way other programs are accidentally interacting with a part of EN's code.

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,954]

12 hours ago, jefito said:

16 hours ago, Dave-in-Decatur said:

One word: DESQview.

*shudder* Fortunately, only ever fooled around with it, but  never really needed to make it work -- it was pretty fragile, in my experience.

On the other hand, my beloved original Compaq Portable, bought with a hard summer's programming gig: dual 360K floppies (no hard drives, a 5MB drive was ~$5000), 512K RAM : boot from DOS disk in drive A, create a RAM drive and load the Lattice C compiler/linker and SEE text editor from drive B into the RAM drive, remove floppy from B and insert source code floppy... good to go. MS-DOS 1, no hi mem, no EMS, no directories, even.

Well, I loved DESQview; it let me multitask while avoiding Windows for several years, until Windows 95 finally got things right by stealing enough from Macintosh and DESQview to work well.

But we're in agreement on the wonderful Compaq "Portable". I think I had a later model, since it did have a gigantic 20MB hard drive as well as the dual floppies. I never did anything high-end on it; but I did install a complex piece of software using a half dozen or so of those floppy disks. I also remember changing planes in Detroit one time--my inbound flight was delayed, and I had to run from one end of the airport to the other lugging that electronic cement block. Ah, the good old days.

@Ralph77, apologies for drifting your thread!

[Ralph77 44]

On 2/10/2019 at 3:34 AM, Dave-in-Decatur said:

@Ralph77, apologies for drifting your thread!

Ha, no probs at all!

Just a quick update - it's now been 24 days since I excluded the Sticky Password executables from EN, and I've had no freezing at all. In my case at least, I'd say the issue is fixed.

[Farne 2]

On 2/1/2019 at 4:54 PM, Ralph77 said:

OK, I've been able to confirm that when running Sticky Password in the background, EN freezes from time to time - even in my Test account in Windows. This is significant because until trying this, nothing would make EN freeze in the Test account. I'm therefore reasonably certain that this is the cause, at least in my case.

OK - this has been driving me nuts, and I fixed the freeze by exiting Sticky Password.  Thank you!  However, shutting down Sticky is a temporary fix, I want both to run.  I am using the current version of EN (6.19.2.8555), but I've had this issue for quite some time over several updates.  Did Sticky support give you a way to fix it?  I think I saw a reference to tweaking something - any help appreciated.

[PinkElephant 8,091]

If you read through the thread, you will find that shutting off some sticky processes through its settings while keeping it running did the job.

Since I am not running this SW, I can’t replicate.

And it seems this was not the only issue, because others here report they were not running SP at all and still had some freezing.

Seems I somehow avoided all that stuff, because my EN is running just fine on Windows (plus Mac + iOS)

[Ralph77 44]

Thanks @PinkElephant and hi @Farne, yes the fix is very easy. There is a tweak in SP settings that allows for the exclusion of any executables you want, so I excluded all of the .exe files in C:\Program Files (x86)\Evernote\Evernote

With Sticky Password unlocked, right-click the tray icon and click Open Sticky Password.
From the drop-down menu in the top right corner, click Settings.
On the left hand side, click Ignored Apps.
Click "+ Add" and browse to your Sticky Password folder, which is probably C:\Program Files (x86)\Evernote\Evernote
There you will be able to select the eight executable files, but you need to do one at a time as it won't let you select multiple files at once.
Click Save, and you're done!

Finally, kindly report back here to confirm that this worked for you?

[PinkElephant 8,091]

By the way: I admire your energy in solving this issue. Can be pretty frustrating on the way ...

[Ralph77 44]

It was indeed. I'd really be intrigued to find out what other programs also make EN freeze too... but for me, it was just Sticky Password.

I also have another program that has started to freeze from time to time, but mainly on start-up (Act! version 6) so my hopes were high that excluding it from SP would fix that too, but alas, 'twas not to be. Who knows, but I reckon these things could possibly be caused by miscellaneous Windows updates, in which case they may only affect users with certain configurations, 3rd party programs and/or Windows sub-versions - making the cause almost impossible to trace. Just a theory though.

 

[PinkElephant 8,091]

Windows updates have been a pain in the ass since about one year now. I was quite happy with Win10 until then. But it was time to change something, after I ran into an updating issue that brought CPU usage to 100% for days, and filled my system SSD up to the last byte. 

I moved to a Mac in April, and use the PC just for some leftover programs. I have Parallels installed on the Mac as VM, with Win10 Pro, but have not found the time yet to really work it through and install the last win programs there. I think that running Win10 with just a few programs in a VM will allow a pretty clean installation that will not case trouble by interfering stuff.

For the rest, the Mac is doing fine. The OS is much cleaner than Windows.

[Farne 2]

Thank you @Ralph77 - this exclusion from the SP settings works!  When I got in there, I realised that I had excluded Excel last year when I had problems with it; I had forgotten about that.

I am grateful for your work - I would not have thought of this kind of problem.  As I have over 14500 notes, lots of tags and links, I thought it would be me.  I have indexed, rebuilt, optimised etc, but all to no avail - yet I didn't have the problem on my work computer.  Now I understand why!!

Again, thanks for your help and for posting the fix.

[Ralph77 44]

You're very welcome @Farne!

@PinkElephant, for the record, here is the list of all the things I tried that didn't work for me, although some of these have worked for others in other threads who have had similar issues:

• Turned off automatic Sync
• Set Automatically save edited note to 300 seconds, no Context
• Tried using EN offline
• Downgraded PC's BIOS (as I had upgraded it about the time this started happening)
• Upgraded EN to latest version
• Upgraded Win 10 from Home to Pro
• Optimized Database under the Help menu (press Help while holding the Ctrl-key) - if anything, this made it worse!
• Removed the EN Web Clipper extension from Chrome
• Deleted the shortcut to Evernote Clipper from C:\Users\Ralph\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup
• Tried deleting C:\Program Files (x86)\Evernote\Evernote\EvernoteClipper.exe but it was re-created next time EN started up
• Disabled "Show Clipping Notifications"
• Disabled Hardware Acceleration
• Disabled Windows Defender 'Control Flow Guard' (CFG) per advice in https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/110116-en-extremely-slow-after-win-10-fall-creators-update-solved/

And finally...

• Logged in to Windows from a Test account instead of my main account - this fixed it, proving that the issue must be a program or background process that's only running in the main account
• Back in the main account, disabled everything in Task manager's Start-up tab - this fixed it, so then a process of elimination was required to isolate the program causing it (Sticky Password)
   

[Osensnolf 12]

I too have this same issue.  I updated from some version of 6.19 to 6.20 because there was a bug fix that I needed.  I'm not sure what happened but it locked up about 6 times within 3 hours and at that point I went back to 6.19.  I started with a new DB (was 14GB) and uninstalled.  Still the same issue after all of that.  Did the same again and went to 6.18.  It's better but not even close to as good as it was before I started the upgrade process... and before then it still wasn't great.

Nearly all of my list use bulleted lists since they are checklists.

My developers really want me to stop using Evernote so that multiple people can make comments at the same time without us losing data.  I think they are right but I like the simplicity but too often I am wasting time waiting on Evernote to catch up.

[Ralph77 44]

Welcome, @Osensnolf. You didn't mention whether you too are using StickyPassword? As this issue seems to be due to a conflict between EN and other program(s), it would be helpful if you could go through the following procedure to find out which of your programs is conflicting with EN. If you manage to pin one down, please post back here as it may help others who are having this issue!

The procedure is a process of elimination:

1. First, disable everything from Task Manager's Start-up tab, then check to see if the issue is resolved.
2. Assuming that resolves the issue, add back half of the disabled items, then re-check EN. (But if disabling everything doesn't resolve the issue, then I'm out of ideas)
3. Eventually you'll be able to narrow it down to the program that's conflicting with EN by adding/removing programs till you find which one is the culprit