(Archived) Grinding to a beach ball / halt

[patnpm 30]

Evernote seems now to be getting very slow with multiple beach balls following any change or addition to the notes.

It's just about unusable now. Is there any thing I can do to speed it up? Would a reinstall and reload of all files help?

Nic Mapstone

[davidbb 0]

I'm having the same beach ball stalling problem in my Macbook Pro. It's getting worse, too. Today, Evernote is unusable on this machine.

My Mac Pro is working fine, so I'm wondering if there is a corrupt database file.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

-David

[JMichaelTest 19]

EN Mac 2.0 Alpha is performing great (very fast) on my new MacBook Air with 1.6 Mhz Dual core, 4 GB RAM laptop.

Don't know anything about beach balls -- haven't seen any since last summer. :wink:

[bpm32 2]

I'm dealing with the same problem. My MBP runs fine other than when using EN. I've essentially quit using it, which is a shame. I am putting my trust in the developers, so I continue to add content. I do know I can get to my content it if I have time to spare.

Hallelujah! Evernote 2.0a is finally responsive on my 3ghz Core 2 Duo/8gb ram MacBook Pro. In the moderate amount of testing I've done, it rarely causes the beach ball. Nice work! I'm a hopeful user.

Brian

[crispinb 8]

Same here mac book pro 2.66 Intel Core i7 + 8GB of RAM + fast HD

only 254 notes and a handfull of tags but editing a note his barely usable because of the slowness of the client.

I recently downgraded from premium to basic for this reason, I'll upgrade back when it has been fixed.

f.

Interesting. I use a much slower machine (2.2 Core Duo, 2GB Ram, 5400rpm HD), with 1721 notes, 10 notebooks and probably 50-60 tags, and have no speed problems (after app startup, which is slowish).

Clearly something going on here that the EN folks should want to track down.

[farmisen 0]

Same here mac book pro 2.66 Intel Core i7 + 8GB of RAM + fast HD

only 254 notes and a handfull of tags but editing a note his barely usable because of the slowness of the client.

I recently downgraded from premium to basic for this reason, I'll upgrade back when it has been fixed.

f.

[jefito 5,589]

I also have this problem. I have around 1500 notes, MBP fast and lots of ram. I do have a load of tags, around 30. Is there anyway to delete lots of tags and keep the notes?

You can delete tags no problem; removing a tag won't remove any associated notes. It just removes the tags from the notes.

~Jeff

[engberg 89]

30 tags isn't very many (I've seen people with over 9,000). That's probably not the issue.

[davecaygill2 0]

I also have this problem. I have around 1500 notes, MBP fast and lots of ram. I do have a load of tags, around 30. Is there anyway to delete lots of tags and keep the notes?

[engberg 89]

We're doing a ton of work on some of these scalability/performance issues. Version 2.0 will fix a bunch of them. We hope to get an early beta test of 2.0 available in the relatively near future.

[bpm32 2]

I'm dealing with the same problem. My MBP runs fine other than when using EN. I've essentially quit using it, which is a shame. I am putting my trust in the developers, so I continue to add content. I do know I can get to my content it if I have time to spare.

Even the web version is slow, but it's more usable than the Mac client at this point. Searching on the iPad version is troublesome at best. There are times the app will crash, will stall, or will error out. But I digress - that's for another forum.

I have 4500+ notes.

Brian

[florida 0]

Same here. Practically unusable on MBP. Is there a way to downgrade to an earlier version from say June or August?

[jefito 5,589]

Thanks for a great product, EverNote team!

I realize that might sound sarcastic (being on a forum that deals with technical problems and all), but I mean the compliment sincerely.

Evernote has been a tremendous help to me, and it's a product I should be (and eventually will be) paying for.

This is a user forum. You can get technical help, make feature requests or engage in Evernote-related tomfoolery here.

(we try to keep the latter to a minimum)

~Jeff

[peterp6 1]

Thanks for a great product, EverNote team!

I realize that might sound sarcastic (being on a forum that deals with technical problems and all), but I mean the compliment sincerely.

Evernote has been a tremendous help to me, and it's a product I should be (and eventually will be) paying for.

Right now, though, I'm eagerly anticipating the next major Mac release and the resolution of the performance issues.

It's nice to have the Web version to get me by until the performance improves, but I do miss my Mac client.

One thing I've learned since the beach balls started dominating the app is that speed trumps just about every other feature!

[engberg 89]

Ok, thanks for the report. We're working to fix these issues in the next major Mac release.

[florida 0]

I tried that but I still find that switching to Evernote and just pressing cmd-N produces a spinning ball ... you wait, type a title and click into the main field, more spinning ball action. Infuriatingly unproductive. Please help...

[engberg 89]

You can try disabling automatic synchronizations (under Preferences > Sync), and then only sync manually when you can afford a delay. We believe that many of these issues are triggered after a synchronization.

[florida 0]

I have the same issue with approx 3.5k notes. It is unusable at the moment.

Any news on how to address this without drastic measures or time consuming rebuilds (I'm on the road at the moment)?

Thanks, Florian

[engberg 89]

I can't say for 100% sure that the problem you're seeing is caused by tags, but there is definitely a performance issue with the way we maintain the "tree" of tags on the left side of the UI. Every time you sync any changes from the server, it rebuilds the tag tree on the left, which takes a horribly long time if you have thousands of notes and many tags applied to your notes.

In that case, I think that deleting tags may help improve the performance until the rewrite is released. But this is obviously a fairly drastic solution. You could try it with synchronization disabled (maybe even networking disabled) to see if it helps. If it doesn't, you could throw away your local database and rebuild it from the server to undo your changes. Here's the instructions for how you rebuild your local Mac database:

If you have some important Local Only or unsynced notes, be sure to read the directions at the end of this email to safeguard your information. Otherwise please try the following:

Please try moving your Evernote database directory so that Evernote will regenerate a new local database by copying your notes back down from the service. To do this:

Quit Evernote from the elephant icon in the menu bar.

In the finder, open the "Library" folder in your home directory. (This is in the directory with your name, NOT at the top level of your hard drive.)

Navigate to "Application Support"

Move the "Evernote" folder from that location to a different place (like the desktop)

Start Evernote, provide your username and password again if needed

This will synchronize all of your notes from the service and create a new local database.

*If you do have any Local Only notebooks, right-click the notebook name in the left-hand notebook pane and select "Export", then export the notebook to .enex format, exporting tags if desired. If you have some unsynchronized notes, you can go to the Note List view, sort by the "Sync" column, and export any notes that have a * in that column to .enex format before following the above instructions. Once those instructions are finished, you can then import the .enex files you created to restore these exported notes.

[patnpm 30]

around 4500 notes, not sure how to assess numbers of tags but it'll be a lot.

Just about unusable on my imac - every time I change something I'm presented with a beachball which can last for minutes. The reason I asked about reinstalling is that subjectively speaking it works quicker on my macbook pro - so I wondered if it was machine dependant.

I'd happily loose a lot of my tags - just about the only tags I regularly use are date tags and although I enter lots of tags I find I normally depend upon searches of note contents. Would it help me to delete the majority of tags?

[engberg 89]

Approximately how many notes and tags do you have in your account?

We are finding some scalability problems with searching and with large amounts of notes & tags in the Mac client. We're working to address these in the next major release (hopefully by the end of the year).