(Archived) Evernote = EverSlow

[DjBea 7]

I love the idea of Evernote, features.... but it find it slow. In the same time, i add notes, it does slower and time.

With lots of notes, it need much powerful computer.

And we can forgot the use with iphone and ipad.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

I love the idea of Evernote, features.... but it find it slow. In the same time, i add notes, it does slower and time.

With lots of notes, it need much powerful computer.

And we can forgot the use with iphone and ipad.

Hi. Of course, the more you have in your account the slower it will get. But, this is true of any database, even if the speed differences are imperceptible to the human eye until your database gets fairly large. You can find my own reflections on using Evernote at 10,000 notes + here.

http://discussion.ev...ce/#entry157875

I plan to write more about this in detail in the coming weeks, but it looks to me that thousands of notes do not dramatically slow down the database, even if they have a lot of content. Attachments seem to affect speed the most. And, they naturally tend to increase the size of your database. This might come as unwelcome news to users of Food, Skitch, and Hello, because these (wonderful) applications are designed to add lots of attachments to your account. Obviously, fairly light users will encounter no problems, but when your database reaches 10 or 20 gigabytes, it will be a concern.

I am sure that Evernote developers are dedicating lots and lots of hours to this problem, because they are rolling out Evernote for Business soon, and with the increased upload amounts for each month, I bet we'll see lots of users with massive databases by this time next year. As you said, that will dramatically impact mobile performance, not to mention initial syncs / offline notebooks, which could take several days to complete if Evernote sticks with the current download speeds (my last initial sync of a 25GB account took several days with several sync errors along the way).

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

By the way, I think this thread would be better in the general discussion forum, so I have moved it there.

I love the idea of Evernote, features.... but it find it slow. In the same time, i add notes, it does slower and time.

With lots of notes, it need much powerful computer.

And we can forgot the use with iphone and ipad.

[DjBea 7]

I have not far from 8000 notes. I saw a big change of speed with using an SSD. But i think all part of the computer need to be fast. Memory, Processor....

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

I have not far from 8000 notes. I saw a big change of speed with using an SSD. But i think all part of the computer need to be fast. Memory, Processor....

An SSD didn't help me much in this regard. Maybe there is a bottleneck somewhere else. I am not sure, but at least on the Mac, I doubt it. Spotlight is blazing fast without a moment of lag in searches (even though they both have incremental search features), notes pop open immediately, as do PDFs and other files. So, things CAN be fast (see my site for other benefits of Spotlight http://www.princeton...ght-search.html).

Actually, Spotlight has indexed not only my current relatively small (under 2GB) database of 10,000+ notes, but my previous 25GB database with all of the attachments as well. Spotlight is doing many times as much work as Evernote, and doing it much more quickly. I have high expectations for future Evernote versions

[jbenson2 2,147]

I love the idea of Evernote, features.... but it find it slow. In the same time, i add notes, it does slower and time.

With lots of notes, it need much powerful computer.

And we can forgot the use with iphone and ipad.

I am running a 6-year old Windows computer.

I've got 18,000 notes and I do not see any noticeable slowdown.

I agree with your comment regarding the iPhone.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

I love the idea of Evernote, features.... but it find it slow. In the same time, i add notes, it does slower and time.

With lots of notes, it need much powerful computer.

And we can forgot the use with iphone and ipad.

I am running a 6-year old Windows computer.

I've got 18,000 notes and I do not see any noticeable slowdown.

I agree with your comment regarding the iPhone.

Besides your web clippings, though, you have very few attachments, right?

[jbenson2 2,147]

Besides your web clippings, though, you have very few attachments, right?

Approximately 1/2 of my notes are web clippings

The other half are PDF scans of bills, statements, etc. The majority are 1 to 2 pages long.

No e-books or huge PDFs

Also very few photos - they are stored in Flickr.

[May 268]

Frankly, slow performance is my biggest complaint at this point,

Evernote is fine on desktop but it's slow on ios because it always syncs whenever you switch to the app and the search could also be slow.

If it's faster to just google something instead of looking it up in Evernote - that's a bit of a fail.

I've done some tests and unfortunately sometimes it's faster to just google stuff.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

Frankly, slow performance is my biggest complaint at this point,

Evernote is fine on desktop but it's slow on ios because it always syncs whenever you switch to the app and the search could also be slow.

If it's faster to just google something instead of looking it up in Evernote - that's a bit of a fail.

I've done some tests and unfortunately sometimes it's faster to just google stuff.

Hi May. I agree that search is a little slow, though it seems to depend on the specificity of a search (advanced search grammar, perhaps in a saved search). Removing attachments from my account (I only have a handful of PDFs in one note now), seems to have helped as well.

[DjBea 7]

Do you know the "Found" app on OSX ?

A feature request for evernote : https://support.foundapp.com/entries/21537512-evernote

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

Found seems cool. But, Spotlight already indexes Evernote, and if Spotlight isn't your cup of tea, HoudahSpot (a front-end for Spotlight) is a nice app. I am unclear what functionality Found adds...

[DjBea 7]

Found add mutli-sources indexing. (Thanks for HoudahSpot. )

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

You are welcome. Multi-sources indexing? Spotlight already indexes Evernote, Dropbox, VoodooPad, and anything else on my drive...

[DjBea 7]

Found index also gmail, gdrive.

I'ts new, i think the idea of developer is global index. It need to get more sources....

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

Found index also gmail, gdrive.

I'ts new, i think the idea of developer is global index. It need to get more sources....

But, in general, Dropbox, gdrive, Mail, Evernote, and everything else is on my local drive and gets indexed. IF Found will go onto the cloud and not only index titles, but index content, then they will have managed to do what even Google Drive cannot do with its own service. Anything short of that is (for me), meh...

I think it is a cool idea, but only if it goes beyond the functionality that is integrated into the OS already.

[lpr 35]

I can only add to the numerous other complaints here and say that indeed, my Evernote has gotten so slow that I now find myself not even wanting to bother using it just because I know its going to be tedious... It's a very big issue because I had "invested" a lot into evernote when I decided to make it the home for a lot of important information. Now I am afraid it is turning into an archaic program and what am I supposed to do with the thousands of important notes I have in it.... ? Manually copy and paste them elsewhere? Of course Evernote does not provide any easy export method since they do not want their users to start using a different service...

I'm very concerned about this speed problem...

[Metrodon 2,184]

You can export to HTML which is pretty much the most portable format that exists.

[Guest mrossk]

You can export single notes, notebooks or the whole database. You can export in one single HTML file, in several HTML-files, as Webarchive and of course the own enex-format.

Which client is slow for you? I have about 1000 notes in a 3 GB Database and use it on 2 Windows computers (home+work) and 2 Android devices (tablet+smartphone). In Android I use only a few notebooks as offline-notebooks. All 4 devices are running fast.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

I can only add to the numerous other complaints here and say that indeed, my Evernote has gotten so slow that I now find myself not even wanting to bother using it just because I know its going to be tedious... It's a very big issue because I had "invested" a lot into evernote when I decided to make it the home for a lot of important information. Now I am afraid it is turning into an archaic program and what am I supposed to do with the thousands of important notes I have in it.... ? Manually copy and paste them elsewhere? Of course Evernote does not provide any easy export method since they do not want their users to start using a different service...

I'm very concerned about this speed problem...

As mentioned by Metrodon, exporting your content in HTML format is a simple and very fast process. In fact, "portability" is one of Evernote's three laws of data protection, so they take this pretty seriously.

http://blog.evernote.com/2011/03/24/evernote’s-three-laws-of-data-protection/

I should clarify that my complaints about speed (with 10,000 + notes and a database of about 25GB -- several decades worth of Free account uploads) were directed at the Mac client, which has incremental search, and no ability to turn it off (as you have with the Windows client). To a lesser degree, I am displeased with the slow searches on the iPad, but that may be due to the device's limits. Overall, I have found everything (except for the incremental search) to be pleasantly snappy.

Could you specify what you think is slow? I'd be interested to hear more.

[lpr 35]

Hi,

Yes you are right, I can export as HTML, sorry my bad. Will that be useful if I wish to start using a new note program in the future?

One strange thing I noticed right away is that I can indeed export notebooks but when I try to export piles of notebooks it invariably goes through the exporting process and then tells me that 0 notes were exported. Is that a bug? Or am I missing something.

Also I am curious about all those exporting options you describe, I have only two choices with the latest mac desktop client , HTML in which case an html document is created for each note with the attached documents in a separate folder for each note , or the enew format. How do you export in one single HTML and what about this Webarchive option ?

I really liked evernote at first because it was speeding up things and giving me easy access to organized date , Now I'm just really concerned since I have committed so much important info to it that I have made a big mistake.... I only have 1674 notes adding up to 3.55 gigs running on a 8g RAM macbook pro from 2010 with 250 free gigs of space ... and it is rather slow now, not excruciatingly slow yet but definitely not snappy, I have to wait seconds for things to appear when I move from note to note etc...

[Metrodon 2,184]

I have more notes and a bigger database running on a slightly better machine than you. I'd suggest you continue to work with support as I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with the app, but there are obviously some small number of use cases where things get slowed down.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

Hi,

Yes you are right, I can export as HTML, sorry my bad. Will that be useful if I wish to start using a new note program in the future?

One strange thing I noticed right away is that I can indeed export notebooks but when I try to export piles of notebooks it invariably goes through the exporting process and then tells me that 0 notes were exported. Is that a bug? Or am I missing something.

Also I am curious about all those exporting options you describe, I have only two choices with the latest mac desktop client , HTML in which case an html document is created for each note with the attached documents in a separate folder for each note , or the enew format. How do you export in one single HTML and what about this Webarchive option ?

I really liked evernote at first because it was speeding up things and giving me easy access to organized date , Now I'm just really concerned since I have committed so much important info to it that I have made a big mistake.... I only have 1674 notes adding up to 3.55 gigs running on a 8g RAM macbook pro from 2010 with 250 free gigs of space ... and it is rather slow now, not excruciatingly slow yet but definitely not snappy, I have to wait seconds for things to appear when I move from note to note etc...

Hi. It sounds like you are on a Mac then.

(1) Once you export into HTML, it is an easy matter to import it into other notetaking programs. Of course, you will be constrained by the limits / capabilities of those programs, and naturally, Evernote's notebooks and tags may not come along for the ride. Two examples I have used with great success:

- VoodooPad import > select files.

- Notational Velocity preferences > notes > storage > formatted html

(2) Exported 0 notes? I have not seen that before. I would contact customer service (see the link in my signature)

(3) Slowness with that hardware and your database size? That sounds odd. Again, I would contact customer service. On my 2010 MBP with 8 GB RAM it ran fine (sold a few months ago to purchase MBA). On my old iMac at work (2010?) running Snow Leopard, it runs fine. Until a few weeks ago I had an account with 10,000 + notes and a database of 25 GB +.

(4) Worried? No reason to be. Everything can be exported anytime (see #1). You cannot really make a mistake, because you can always back out of it. The two programs I mentioned in #1 are also no-risk propositions. Your data can easily move in and out of them.

[lpr 35]

Heum... Thank you for your help, I will contact costumer service as suggested.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

Heum... Thank you for your help, I will contact costumer service as suggested.

Good luck. Let us know how it goes!

[pfc 1]

Evernote slow fix, For evernote forum

Here are my experiments with the sluggish slow problem:

1) I noticed unbearable sluggishness on a lengthy text note I had been working on for the past10 days. Created entirely in Evernote, not imported.

-I carefully copied sections of the lengthy note into a new note.

-Then I cut the transferred sections from the lengthy note, until the lenthy note's sluggishness was gone.

-I transferred about 30 lines of text 7 times. I ended up transferring about 200 lines of text, leaving about 400 lines in the original text.

-Following this, in both the shortened original note and the new pasted note, I cound now input and edit without sluggishness. *The lengthy note is becoming slightly sluggish again as I add more text.*

2) I had 2 notes with heavy color formatting imported from Freenote app. These were shorter in length, and were fairly sluggish.

The only way I could undo the formatting on my Android tablet was the following:

-Cut and paste the note, in (at least) 2 parts, into a new note.

[The color formatting remained if I selected all, or if I manually highlighted all the text. I had to do it in parts]

[*Update: color reformatting is easily accomplished on Windows version of Evernote.]

-The new note was all black text, with no more heavy color formatting. The sluggishness was gone.

*-Imported notes with one or two lines of color formatting, have not been slow for me.*

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

Evernote slow fix, For evernote forum

Here are my experiments with the sluggish slow problem:

1) I noticed unbearable sluggishness on a lengthy text note I had been working on for the past10 days.

-I carefully copied sections of the lengthy note into a new note.

-Then I cut the transferred sections from the lengthy note, until the lenthy note's sluggishness was gone.

-I transferred about 30 lines of text 7 times. I ended up transferring about 200 lines of text, leaving about 400 lines in the original text.

-Following this, in both the shortened original note and the new pasted note, I cound now input and edit without sluggishness. *The lengthy note is becoming slightly sluggish again as I add more text.*

2) I had 2 notes with heavy color formatting imported from Freenote app. These were shorter in length, and were fairly sluggish.

The only way I could undo the formatting was the following:

-Cut and paste the note, in (at least) 2 parts, into a new note.

[The color formatting remained if I selected all, or if I manually highlighted all the text. I had to do it in parts]

-The new note was all black text, with no more heavy color formatting. The sluggishness was gone.

*-Imported notes with one or two lines of color formatting, have not been slow for me.*

Thanks for sharing this with us!

I work a lot in plain text, and I am happy to say that I generally do not see sluggishness on the desktop, even on very long notes. I am getting the sense from your results and those of others that the more formatting and other fancy stuff you have, the slower things become. In my case, I can at least say that text alone doesn't seem to be a problem.

On the mobile devices, though, it can be hit or miss, depending on the latest release, and the shorter the notes, the better off you are.

[ooMikeoo 4]

My comment to this topic only refers to the startup time for iOS evernote app. I'm new to evernote so I don't think the database size is an issue. I find it takes 5-6 seconds for the app to start up. In comparison the Simplenote app is about 1 second.

This is on iPhone 4s.

[TonyEN 1]

Hmm, more data does not necessarily mean slower, just think of # of web site out there, it grows exponentially every day, but doing a searching on the web does not get slower at all. I understand what EN does with notes is not the same as searching a page on the web, but I want to point out plenty of technology out there are available to make getting data fast even on huge data set. Please bring the slowness issue to the attention of the developer, and get make it a priority to solve it soon so the users are happy and EN is more successful.

 

I love the idea of Evernote, features.... but it find it slow. In the same time, i add notes, it does slower and time.
With lots of notes, it need much powerful computer.

And we can forgot the use with iphone and ipad.

Hi. Of course, the more you have in your account the slower it will get. But, this is true of any database, even if the speed differences are imperceptible to the human eye until your database gets fairly large. You can find my own reflections on using Evernote at 10,000 notes + here.
http://discussion.ev...ce/#entry157875

I plan to write more about this in detail in the coming weeks, but it looks to me that thousands of notes do not dramatically slow down the database, even if they have a lot of content. Attachments seem to affect speed the most. And, they naturally tend to increase the size of your database. This might come as unwelcome news to users of Food, Skitch, and Hello, because these (wonderful) applications are designed to add lots of attachments to your account. Obviously, fairly light users will encounter no problems, but when your database reaches 10 or 20 gigabytes, it will be a concern.

I am sure that Evernote developers are dedicating lots and lots of hours to this problem, because they are rolling out Evernote for Business soon, and with the increased upload amounts for each month, I bet we'll see lots of users with massive databases by this time next year. As you said, that will dramatically impact mobile performance, not to mention initial syncs / offline notebooks, which could take several days to complete if Evernote sticks with the current download speeds (my last initial sync of a 25GB account took several days with several sync errors along the way).

[magicindustries 0]

I'm a software developer so I get that a large DB can slow down a search, but surely caching can speed up the general loading of the app? And there's absolutely no reason for it to take 30 seconds or more just to open a new note window - that's unusable in my book.  I adore evernote but it's getting more and more frustrating to use.

[WishIWasFishin 13]

I'm on a mac with 16gig and SSD, just over 750 notes, most are pdf files.  Some of my pdf files are several hundred pages.  I get the spinning beach ball nearly every time I do a search.  Evernote is unbearably slow and almost useless.  At this rate ... I won't renew my premium subscription.  I'll find an alternative if this isn't resolved soon.

[DjBea 7]

I still love Evernote concept. But still disappointed by slow(ness) (and by missing somes basics features like search&replace)  And the need of powerful computer for big databases.

 

When it synchronize  (on MacBook retina i7 2.6Ghz), Evernote software freeze during several minutes... I don't understand why developers don't separate synchronizing process and interface process ?? 

I think that synchronizing processing should not downgrade user experience.

[orks 4]

You can export single notes, notebooks or the whole database. You can export in one single HTML file, in several HTML-files, as Webarchive and of course the own enex-format.

Which client is slow for you? I have about 1000 notes in a 3 GB Database and use it on 2 Windows computers (home+work) and 2 Android devices (tablet+smartphone). In Android I use only a few notebooks as offline-notebooks. All 4 devices are running fast.

I have close to 8,000 notes, Windows is OK for me. Android is quite fine. Iphone is unusable.

The last thing I would like to consider is to start preparing a way out of Evernote just because of this but, if that is the case, lucky me i'll be able to work with all these export formats.

Meanwhile, I still wait for Evernote to surprise us and bring back what we had in the Iphone.

[orks 4]

My comment to this topic only refers to the startup time for iOS evernote app. I'm new to evernote so I don't think the database size is an issue. I find it takes 5-6 seconds for the app to start up. In comparison the Simplenote app is about 1 second.

This is on iPhone 4s.

 

The most irritating slugghish problem i see in the Iphone 4S is then typing, the words do not appear immediately. Then, when the phrase completes, you see that some letters are missing.

Other than this, just the search timing the takes several seconds to complete.

 

I think Evernote loses a lot of its value if all the generated content in the database cannot be readily accessed on mobiles like the iphone where it's the platform where many people will consult data while on the road.

I really hope our folks at Evernote will give the right priority to resolving this thing.

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

When it synchronize  (on MacBook retina i7 2.6Ghz), Evernote software freeze during several minutes... I don't understand why developers don't separate synchronizing process and interface process ?? 

I think that synchronizing processing should not downgrade user experience.

 

DjBea, what version of Mac OS and EN Mac are you running?

[DjBea 7]

JMichael

 

  Evernote V 5.4.1

  OSX : 10.9

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

JMichael

 

  Evernote V 5.4.1

  OSX : 10.9

 

Thanks.  You might want to consider updating to the latest ver just out last week, ver 5.4.2.

 

If your bugs/issues still exist, you can report them to  Feedback for Mac Evernote Version 5.4.2

[cwb 225]

The most irritating slugghish problem i see in the Iphone 4S is then typing, the words do not appear immediately. Then, when the phrase completes, you see that some letters are missing.

Other than this, just the search timing the takes several seconds to complete.

Do you have a lot of offline content?

[orks 4]

 

The most irritating slugghish problem i see in the Iphone 4S is then typing, the words do not appear immediately. Then, when the phrase completes, you see that some letters are missing.

Other than this, just the search timing the takes several seconds to complete.

Do you have a lot of offline content?

 

 

Yes, I think 80% of all my close to 8,000 notes are needed to be accessed offline. This is basically one of the main functions of my smartphone: allow me access to my content wherever I am in this large country with this very poor 3G connection.

[cwb 225]

That does seem to be the key differentiator in user experience reports between zippy and molasses.

See http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/43855-ios7-upgrade-has-really-slowed-en-down/ where performance was regained after trimming or removing offline content.

[orks 4]

That does seem to be the key differentiator in user experience reports between zippy and molasses.

See http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/43855-ios7-upgrade-has-really-slowed-en-down/ where performance was regained after trimming or removing offline content.

 

Thanks cwb. Yes, I keep seeing here people getting rid of things in Evernote to make it worth again, to make it speed up again, to make it usable again. Things like removing offline data, using less pictures, attaching less files, creating shorter notes but, at the end, i don't see how useful can be an application if it is to have this number of requirements for it, at least, to work reasonably.

My option for Evernote was because it's portable and also because i can have access to my data while offline.

If the only option for it to be useful for me is to not use all of its resources, then I'll have to start think on something else.

Anyway, thanks for being kind and point me this thread about removing offline content.

I'll keep waiting for Evernote to resolve these issues.

Thanks much.

Orks.

[Don G. 1]

(cross-post from similar topic)

 

I believe I have solved this. I can’t be certain every step is needed, but this is what I did – and an increasing Evernote startup delay went from minutes to literally sub-second. Windows 7 64 bit.

1. Uninstall your local Evernote using normal the normal Windows 7 “Programs and Features” uninstall.
2. In your user AppData folder (which is usually hidden, so you may need to change that in your folder controls), search and destroy any files owned by Evernote. Note that these may appear in at least two different sub-folders; be thorough. Note also, though, that other programs such as your browser(s) have data in AppData. If you care, don’t kill stuff related, for example, to your Google searches done to try to solve this problem!
3. Use CCleaner to clean up (i.e., clobber) any registry references to Evernote.
4. Remove any remaining Evernote desktop shortcuts – including Launchpad icons.
5. Download the current Evernote install file and run it. Set up a new launchpad icon (optional). Start Evernote and sign in. Enjoy (assuming this all works).

Note:  I’m reasonably certain the root cause of the problem is that at least one Evernote update did only a partial job of switching all references to itself – and of cleaning up after the update itself. There was a load of stuff in the AppData folder(s) relating to previous Evernote versions.

 

Final note: I have two Windows 7 systems with the same exact versions of Windows and of Evernote. One had this problem (solved as above). The other seems not to … yet. This might or might not relate to the fact that one system (the one that had the problem) is several years old, whereas the other was rebuilt from scratch (a completely new hard disk) within the last six months.  So, it could be that Evernote’s installation routine failed to clean up a really old previous Evernote install at some point. That’s just an educated guess, though.