Layouts taking forever to open
Comments
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Dave Hooton said:
Have you updated the firmware and Magician as per http://www.anandtech.com/show/9196/samsung-releases-second-840-evo-fix ?
Yes Dave, thanks for asking. I installed both and ran them. It says the health of my SSD is "Good". Afterwards, it still took 3 minutes and 5 seconds to boot up Logos to my Bible Reading Layout.
Something else is still going on.
Using adventure and community to challenge young people to continually say "yes" to God
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I'll ask the desktop team to get in contact with you to help track this down.
Bradley, have you done this yet as I have not heard from anyone yet?
Also, I thought I'd give another update on things. The person who manages our computer network at work helped me do a full analysis of my laptop and determined that my laptop and my SSD and in excellent condition. But in analyzing the computer processes used when Logos is launched, Logos often said "not responding" but the disk activity was almost nothing. So, he believes that this is a Logos programming issue.
In light of this it would be great to have someone help me solve this. The last time I started Logos it took almost 4 minutes to boot and this is after I deleted all of my more complex collections. Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks.
Using adventure and community to challenge young people to continually say "yes" to God
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Bruce Dunning said:
Bradley, have you done this yet as I have not heard from anyone yet?
I have. The lead on this is out on vacation and won't be back for week. And then he'll probably be catching up on email for another week after that... [;)]
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Bruce Dunning said:
Bradley, have you done this yet as I have not heard from anyone yet?
I have. The lead on this is out on vacation and won't be back for week. And then he'll probably be catching up on email for another week after that...
Thanks for confirming. I don't mind waiting but just wanted to make sure it was passed on to them.
Using adventure and community to challenge young people to continually say "yes" to God
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Bruce Dunning said:
Bradley, have you done this yet as I have not heard from anyone yet?
I have. The lead on this is out on vacation and won't be back for week. And then he'll probably be catching up on email for another week after that...
I'm 99% certain the issue is to do with your Layouts. You have 1,626 layouts stored in that file, and all of them are read into memory whenever layouts are needed (e.g. to populate the layouts menu).
Either (a) Faithlife will need to fix the bug that retains all your old layouts [if that is a bug], or (b) they need to fix a possible bug that seems to restart reading this file into memory if it takes too long, or (c) they need to optimise the process so that only the basic information (name) is stored in memory, and the specific information (thumbnail, layout details) is only accessed on demand, so that it can be loaded quicker.
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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Mark Barnes said:
I'm 99% certain the issue is to do with your Layouts. You have 1,626 layouts stored in that file, and all of them are read into memory whenever layouts are needed (e.g. to populate the layouts menu).
More and more I'm also convinced that it is a layout problem. Just to be sure that others who read this are not confused I actually only have 31 saved layouts and not 1,626. What Mark is referring to is something that must be happening within the program (he calls it a bug) that automatically saves previous layouts and I guess is retaining them.
Mark, are you thinking that this "bug" might be specific to me? Otherwise, why would others not be experiencing the same thing?
Just to add another frustrating fact - after I have a layout open and I press on the "Layouts" tab, it takes over a minute for the options just to appear which is crazy. As I think back I also don't think that it was as bad in L6 compared to L7.
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Bruce Dunning said:
More and more I'm also convinced that it is a layout problem. Just to be sure that others who read this are not confused I actually only have 31 saved layouts and not 1,626. What Mark is referring to is something that must be happening within the program (he calls it a bug) that automatically saves previous layouts and I guess is retaining them.
You have 31 different named layouts, but Logos is also storing previous versions of those layouts. It's particularly an issue with your Bible study layout, which you've updated hundreds of times. If you look in your layouts menu (if you can bear to click it!), and scroll through the right-hand portion, you'll see all those old versions of the layouts still there, and if you kept scrolling, I imagine you'll see all 1,626 (or at least more than 31).
I don't know whether this is a bug, or just a design decision that isn't working well for you. Personally, I no longer use layouts, and I don't know what's supposed to happen when you update a layout.
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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Mark Barnes said:
I don't know whether this is a bug, or just a design decision that isn't working well for you.
Thanks for your explanation Mark. The layout that it used the most often is my Bible Reading layout which I use every day as I choose different ways to read through it each year. It will be interesting to speak with the Faithlife team about this issue and perhaps I will find out if it is a bug or a design decision. Either way, I do hope it can be fixed.
Using adventure and community to challenge young people to continually say "yes" to God
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Bruce Dunning said:Mark Barnes said:
I'm 99% certain the issue is to do with your Layouts. You have 1,626 layouts stored in that file, and all of them are read into memory whenever layouts are needed (e.g. to populate the layouts menu).
More and more I'm also convinced that it is a layout problem. Just to be sure that others who read this are not confused I actually only have 31 saved layouts and not 1,626. What Mark is referring to is something that must be happening within the program (he calls it a bug) that automatically saves previous layouts and I guess is retaining them.
Mark, are you thinking that this "bug" might be specific to me? Otherwise, why would others not be experiencing the same thing?
Just to add another frustrating fact - after I have a layout open and I press on the "Layouts" tab, it takes over a minute for the options just to appear which is crazy. As I think back I also don't think that it was as bad in L6 compared to L7.
Bruce: I'm experiencing the same problem and I do NOT have all those collections or layouts.
Cynthia
Romans 8:28-38
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Mark Barnes said:
You have 31 different named layouts, but Logos is also storing previous versions of those layouts. It's particularly an issue with your Bible study layout, which you've updated hundreds of times. If you look in your layouts menu (if you can bear to click it!), and scroll through the right-hand portion, you'll see all those old versions of the layouts still there, and if you kept scrolling, I imagine you'll see all 1,626 (or at least more than 31).
I've always been curious about these layouts on the right side - I figured they were previous versions but I was afraid to delete them in case I deleted my actual layout. To experiment, I created a test layout and updated it a few times - a new version appears on the right every time I did so. If I deleted all but the latest version, the saved layout would remain. If I deleted the latest version, the saved layout would be deleted as well. The versions are time-stamped so you can see which is the latest etc. With this new knowledge, I filtered my layouts by name (I only have 9 saved layouts) and deleted all previous versions. I'll now do this on a regular basis; at any given time I want the number of versions to match the number of actual saved layouts.
Mark Barnes said:
Personally, I no longer use layouts, and I don't know what's supposed to happen when you update a layout.
If you don't mind sharing, I'm curious how you use Logos and don't use layouts.
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Cynthia in Florida said:
Bruce: I'm experiencing the same problem and I do NOT have all those collections or layouts.
Cynthia, thanks for letting me know. I feel that I have some company now. Not sure if you are experiencing the same thing but I hope it gets resolved for you too.
Using adventure and community to challenge young people to continually say "yes" to God
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Yasmin Stephen said:
If you don't mind sharing, I'm curious how you use Logos and don't use layouts.
Many years ago I used to use layouts. Like many people, I'd have specific layouts for different types of study.
However, ultimately, I found layouts to be unhelpful. All they really do is open a bunch of resources, most of which I don't need at the moment. I'd rather a more fluid approach to study, where my 'layout' constantly evolves depending on where I am in the process. The advantages of this are considerable:
- My entire screen is dedicated to what I'm working on at the exact moment. I don't have lots of panels/tabs open "just in case".
- With a fixed layout, I'm likely to consult a limited range of books, and forget to think whether others would be helpful.
- I have more freedom to develop a study in the direction dictated by the text, rather than according to a formula that I usually follow.
- Moving about is normally quicker, as I tend not to have linked panels that I only occasionally need.
So generally, I'll begin with a 'layout' that is simply a single bible. Nothing else. If I need more versions, I have several one-click multiview shortcuts to bring them up.
At some point I'll want to consult lexicons, and can fire my preferred lexicon in three clicks. If I need more lexicons, I double-click the blank space next to the new tab button. If I need even more info, I can fire up a custom BWS, which has quick links to lexicons, roots, and searching.
At another point I'll want to consult commentaries. I can close all my lexicons in two clicks, and fire up my custom passage guide in a few more. That gives me quick links to all my commentaries. I'll generally consult at least 7-10 in a study, which is generally too many to have open in a layout, anyway. If I need to do some searches to check what I'm reading, I can drag a search panel to the bottom-half of my bible.
The "secret" to working like this is (a) custom guides that are designed for specific situations, and (b) multiview shortcuts. By having several well-designed guides, I can very quickly open all the resources you probably open in a layout, without needing them permanently open, cluttering my display, and can pretty seamlessly switch between a word study, exegesis of a larger section, or theological study, as my needs dictate.
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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Mark Barnes said:
The "secret" to working like this is (a) custom guides that are designed for specific situations, and (b) multiview shortcuts. By having several well-designed guides, I can very quickly open all the resources you probably open in a layout, without needing them permanently open, cluttering my display, and can pretty seamlessly switch between a word study, exegesis of a larger section, or theological study, as my needs dictate.
Thank you - this response is very helpful! As I'm dedicating more time to both Bible study and learning to use Logos better, I do find that layouts get in my way sometimes (especially if it becomes too cluttered and I find myself alternately docking and floating resources), and I was only this week thinking that having a Passage Guide open in a layout leads to duplication in some areas.
For my morning devotional routine, I do need a layout because I mostly access the same resources every day (Bible, devotional, prayer lists, etc). For Bible study, I definitely see how guides could be the better way to go for me; for some reason, I haven’t used the guides much. I'll work on that. Also, I hadn't given thought to using multiview shortcuts - I like the feature and having a few set up as one-clicks would be a good enhancement to my process.
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Mark Barnes said:
You have 31 different named layouts, but Logos is also storing previous versions of those layouts.
That was educational. Since Logos is relatively new for me, I only had a single layout with about 20-30 previous versions of it. I went though and deleted those old versions that Logos had been keeping around.
How many of us need to revert back to an old version of a layout from months ago?
Perhaps the program should prune older versions for us, to avoid ending up with hundreds of versions for a single layout, or slowdowns which may result from that.
Thanks to FL for including Carta and a Hebrew audio bible in Logos 9!
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Bruce or Mark,
Could you email Bruce's layouts.db to testing@faithlife.com (or a Dropbox download link or some way to retrieve the file)? We'd like to take a look at it here too.
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Not sure if this will help or not, but I just checked on my layout history and I have layouts that date back to December 2009 (and they still open). This is not the saved layouts, but the layout history. So I'm guessing that most of these can be deleted without problem. Almost 7 years of layouts is beyond belief.
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1. Is it the actual saved layouts or the historical layouts or both that may cause the slowdown?
2. If I dare ask, can a really brave person mass delete unneeded records from the appropriate db file without creating havoc in the database, index and syncing and such? (Not having extra time, I am not feeling very courageous to experiment at the moment).
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Bruce or Mark,
Could you email Bruce's layouts.db to testing@faithlife.com (or a Dropbox download link or some way to retrieve the file)? We'd like to take a look at it here too.
I don't think that I am able to email a file that is 85 MB. The last time Mark gave me a dropbox link that I used to send it to him. It might be easier for him to send it to you but I might be able to figure it out if needed.
Using adventure and community to challenge young people to continually say "yes" to God
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Gao Lu said:
If I dare ask, can a really brave person mass delete unneeded records from the appropriate db file without creating havoc in the database, index and syncing and such?
Not really.
You could remove the row from your local database, but that won't automatically be recorded as a "delete" in sync, so the layout won't truly be deleted. (It might not reappear on that machine immediately, but it would come back down from sync if you reinstalled.)
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Bruce Dunning said:
I don't think that I am able to email a file that is 85 MB. The last time Mark gave me a dropbox link that I used to send it to him. It might be easier for him to send it to you but I might be able to figure it out if needed.
Zip it up and it might get a lot smaller. Could be 1/3 - 1/8 smaller.
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Bruce Dunning said:
Mark, are you thinking that this "bug" might be specific to me? Otherwise, why would others not be experiencing the same thing?
I reported the speed issues with the layout menu way back in 2014 (https://community.logos.com/forums/t/84465.aspx) and that the solution was deleting snapshots, old saves etc. Others have made similar requests since then ... you are not alone!
If I remember then, it was also effecting my overall logo speed ... but i could be wrong. Since 2014 I have been deleting evry snapshot and second copy of a layout as part of my routine.
2017 15" MBP, iPad Pro
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Bruce or Mark,
Could you email Bruce's layouts.db to testing@faithlife.com (or a Dropbox download link or some way to retrieve the file)? We'd like to take a look at it here too.
I've emailed a Dropbox link to that address. It's a 235Mb file, zipped to around 85Mb.
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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Martin Folley said:
I reported the speed issues with the layout menu way back in 2014 (https://community.logos.com/forums/t/84465.aspx) and that the solution was deleting snapshots, old saves etc. Others have made similar requests since then ... you are not alone!
Which proves my analysis is essentially correct. I'm surprised we haven't heard more people complain, but this issue might explain why some people find Logos much slower than others.
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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Gao Lu said:
Zip it up and it might get a lot smaller. Could be 1/3 - 1/8 smaller.
That was the zipped size!
Using adventure and community to challenge young people to continually say "yes" to God
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Mark Barnes said:Martin Folley said:
I reported the speed issues with the layout menu way back in 2014 (https://community.logos.com/forums/t/84465.aspx) and that the solution was deleting snapshots, old saves etc. Others have made similar requests since then ... you are not alone!
Which proves my analysis is essentially correct. I'm surprised we haven't heard more people complain, but this issue might explain why some people find Logos much slower than others.
Thanks Martin for reminding me of this thread. Mark, I'm increasingly becoming more convinced of your analysis and I too am surprised that we have not heard more people complain of slower speeds because of this.
Using adventure and community to challenge young people to continually say "yes" to God
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Bruce Dunning said:Erwin Stull, Sr. said:
That is an awful lot of SSDs for that period of time. I wonder if it may be better to just go for or stay with 7200rpm drives. Most of my drives outlast the general architecture of the machine, and that is with heavy use and barely no air conditioning.
Yes I was disappointed with the life of these drives but I could not think of using Logos without a SSD as I would spend all of my time waiting for it to index etc. which is what it used to be like.
Hi Bruce; This is an update of my previous reply on 9/25/2016.
Guess what? My son in-law blessed me with a Dell Precision M4800 Workstation Laptop with an i7 QC 2.8, 32G RAM, and a 512G SSD. All of a sudden, my other Logos machines seen somewhat unbearable. [:D]
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Mark Barnes said:
Bruce or Mark,
Could you email Bruce's layouts.db to testing@faithlife.com (or a Dropbox download link or some way to retrieve the file)? We'd like to take a look at it here too.
I've emailed a Dropbox link to that address. It's a 235Mb file, zipped to around 85Mb.
Mark,
I received the file and have updated the case.
Thanks for helping get Bruce's file to us.
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Mark Barnes said:
You have 31 different named layouts, but Logos is also storing previous versions of those layouts. It's particularly an issue with your Bible study layout, which you've updated hundreds of times. If you look in your layouts menu (if you can bear to click it!), and scroll through the right-hand portion, you'll see all those old versions of the layouts still there, and if you kept scrolling, I imagine you'll see all 1,626 (or at least more than 31).
I don't know whether this is a bug, or just a design decision that isn't working well for you. Personally, I no longer use layouts, and I don't know what's supposed to happen when you update a layout.
Logos 7 will automatically purge old unnamed layouts but it keeps all layouts you have explicitly named. (The thinking was that if you named it, it was important. We didn't ask "what will happen if someone updates the same layout daily for five years?", probably because when this code was written, Logos 4 might not even have been shipping yet!)
It's now time to ask that question. For those of you who are heavy layouts users, what would be a good "data retention" policy?
Keep only the most recent 5? 10? 30? copies of a named layout. Also delete any duplicate copies older than 30? 60? 90? days?
Edit: bear in mind that since we don't currently provide any way to restore a deleted layout from documents.logos.com, any layouts automatically deleted by this algorithm won't be easily recoverable. (This is a separate problem, and one we could fix to also help customers who mistakenly delete the wrong layout.)
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It's now time to ask that question. For those of you who are heavy layouts users, what would be a good "data retention" policy?
Keep only the most recent 5? 10? 30? copies of a named layout. Also delete any duplicate copies older than 30? 60? 90? days?
The (macOS) Time Machine style of versioning is a practical approach, where it keeps hourly copies for today, every other hour for yesterday, daily copies of the last month, and weekly copies for the last years.
The reason why I recommend a more complex approach like that, rather than simply truncating or aging the revisions is that:
- Keeping n most recent wouldn't be safe by itself. For example, when Logos 7 came out, I probably made 10 revisions to my (L6) layout to accommodate the new features, before settling on my present layout. I definitely wouldn't want my "original" to inadvertently be blown away, if I experimented more than the threshold allowed, and was stuck with only today's revisions to fall back on.
- The older than n days approach has potential, but you'd have to ensure you retained a minimum number for that approach, or you'd end up with the scenario that all duplicates are eventually older then n days, and have no backup at all.
Some last m, n, o copies per day, week, month, up to p months is a bit more complex then simply truncating or aging, yet would give the most flexibility, by preserving p older (major) changes without letting the number of recent daily (or weekly) smaller changes grow out of hands.
That would give someone the most flexibility of being able to revert back to either a recent or a distant version (of a particular named layout).
Thanks to FL for including Carta and a Hebrew audio bible in Logos 9!
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Erwin Stull, Sr. said:
y son in-law blessed me with a Dell Precision M4800 Workstation Laptop with an i7 QC 2.8, 32G RAM, and a 512G SSD. All of a sudden, my other Logos machines seen somewhat unbearable.
That sure is a blessing!
Using adventure and community to challenge young people to continually say "yes" to God
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