Bug: Logos 4 resource hogging

Francis said:

Dave, is it a necessary inference that
problems with 450 resources and not more means that the number is not a
factor? 450 resources may be significantly less than 1,500 or more but
I'd be curious to know about the experience of those who have a smaller
library yet (for instance, one of the smaller e-bible packages or other
small collections). But perhaps you're right, I just wonder.

You aren't going to find too many people with significantly smaller libraries.  I started with the second smallest package (Bible Study Library), which had slightly fewer than 300 resources...and these problems haven't changed appreciably as I've added 150+ new resources.  The relative speed has stayed the same (improvements in the newer versions of the software excepted) [:)]

Michael Ballai said:

Most problems seem to go away if I reboot and keep most other apps closed. Logos is my priority application. It seems to act like a bully in the sandbox at times--it wants the whole thing to itself. A precocious problem child.

Maybe my problem is that I usually have a dozen or more apps running at the same time as Logos (the others mostly just sitting idle in the background). But even so I usually still have gobs of free RAM and very little CPU usage. This snapshot was taken while Logos was opening the clippings file that takes it 30 seconds to open:

Here is (what seems to be) a relevant piece of info from another thread similar to this one:

William A Horsburgh said:

Since I'd complained and stirred things up yesterday, I thought I
should inform you that my Logos 4 is working as normal this morning, I'm
even connected to the internet and there are no 'not responding'
warnings.

What's changed? I removed a little utility designed to give me an xp
like start menu instead of the windows  7 one. I only installed it this
week and it wasn't working properly, now it's gone, so are my troubles
with Logos 4.

It might be worth checking to see if anything is running in the background that has a problem with L4.

Myself, I keep my machine pretty clean and don't run virus...no firewall (except win firewall) , no utilities....so this could be relevant.

Francis said:

The only significant program I have running in the background is Avast. I think these days users could not be expected not to run a security software lest it impairs normal performance of other programs (though occasional security conflicts need to be worked out). Otherwise, I don't have anything special in there, more so of the standard stuff: adobe and office launcher, video card settings utility, this kind of stuff. So, I'm not sure that this is the answer... at least not for me.

Francis,

It MIGHT be worth doing a "selective startup" sort of thing...you know....turn off all of the auto starting programs...then fire up logos....if it acts differently, then add them back one by one....until the culprit is found....

Other wise...it's just guessing....

Robert Pavich said:

PS: A quick search of "Avast slows down my computer" in Google reveals LOTS of threads on the subject where people are complaining about things slowing down while avast is running.

 

So it seems like it's worth turning everything off...and starting from there....just a thought.

You might feel uneasy running without protection for a brief time until you can sort matters out, but I went for years without an antivirus program without getting hit.  The main thing is to be very careful regarding opening any attachments (most especially from unknown sources) and restricting yourself to known safe sites.  That may mean giving up your porn site, but that's the price you pay.  [6]  [:D]  Don't hit me !

i know that you addressed Rosie, but not all users will have the same wishes.

Bradley Grainger said:

How many collections do you have?

Perhaps in this case you could add a menu item (in the search menu [icon in the upper left] which would allow us to disable the use (similar to Cited By checkboxes) to limit which collections & tagged resources to use in our search.
EDIT: i know that the key use of collections is for searching, but some collections i use primarily for PG. Also i have a large number of tagged resources of which only a few that i would want to search.

Bradley Grainger said:

We've chosen to minimize mouse clicks and movement, at the expense of having a menu that populates dynamically. That is, this is by design.

i want to keep dynamic design so that i don't get resources which are not relevant. But for those with larger libraries or who are experiencing this issue, you could add an item in Program Settings to disable dynamic in which case it just gave them their top 5 resources (of which some would not have their word in them). EDIT: this could also work with PRs.

Bradley Grainger said:

One final thing: how many visual filters do you typically have enabled, and how many of them search for "*"? If you love to do that, just know that the system will not love you back... I would highly recommend disabling as many of those as you can.

 i keep most of my visual filters Off until i want to view them and even then selectively in specific resources. (EDIT: i do the same with much of my highlighting).  i do notice sluggishness when i have several resources linked and have Information and other tools up. It would be nice in Information if we could select On Hover or On Click for the information tool. i can do this on some of the other tools. This might speed up scrolling a little so that information tool isn't trying to populated as i move my mouse around. (oops, this ability is already there [:$] )

Bradley Grainger said:

Rosie Perera said:

The things that I still find way too slow and annoying are dropping down a menu that has a dynamically generated list of resources (e.g., the "Search In" menu for Bible Search

How many collections do you have?

Lots. I use them for all kinds of things (creating bibliographies, or at least making suggestions of resources on areas of interest of mine; helping me wrap my head around what-all is in my library; and structured browsing), rarely just for limiting searches. I have only a handful of collections that I use to restrict searches. The vast majority are not for that purpose. I have around 120 in all. I'm attaching a list of them.

I am unhappy with the implication that I cannot have lots of collections if I want the Logos UI to feel snappy. You produce this powerful software and I love it and long to be a power user of it. Having lots of collections doesn't appear to me to be an unreasonable expectation. The more resources I buy from Logos the more collections I think of that I want to have. If that will be too hard for Logos to handle, maybe I ought to stop buying so many new resources... [;)]

Bradley Grainger said:

Rosie Perera said:

, and the left side of the right-click menu when you right-click on a single word).

English words, Greek words, Hebrew words, any words? Is this a word found in a dictionary, or a typo? Can you give more specific examples?

Lo and behold, this particular performance problem seems to have been fixed! It used to be with any word (English, Greek, Hebrew, and I'd usually be annoyed with it most when I was reporting typos, because I had to wait for the menu to populate before the Report Typo command would show up). But it was very snappy when I just tried it now. So thanks for fixing it, and sorry I hadn't noticed when that change occurred. It's been relatively recently, since 4.3 beta 1 or 2.

Bradley Grainger said:

Rosie Perera said:

I get the spinning "wait" icon in those instances and it takes many seconds to finish. Unacceptable. The UI should have a really snappy feel, and dropdown menus should all appear virtually instantaneously.

Let's assume that in order to show a list of dictionaries on the context menu for a word, we need to determine which dictionaries contain that word. (I would assume it's unacceptable to display incorrect and inappropriate destinations.)

Determining these destinations (in a dynamic library) will require some amount of work to be done, whether it be looking the word up in a central DB or opening individual resources to check. Should drop-down menus not be allowed to perform any work, so that they can appear instantaneously? Should the menus be completely static, with the dynamic options replaced with commands that open new reports that do the equivalent work? (I.e., instead of listing dictionaries, hard-code a menu item that opens a report that loads the top 5+ KeyLink destinations.)

Totally understandable, and yet that is now fast enough for me. I'm still concerned about the "Search in" dropdown in Bible Search, though. Why would that be any more complicated to generate than the list of dictionaries in the context menu for a word? It takes on the order of 8 seconds to display, and all that's in that dropdown is a list of all my collections and series that have Bibles in them. Can't that info be cached -- to be updated whenever the user edits a collection definition or downloads new resources (relatively infrequent operations which one might expect to take a bit longer than menu dropdown, and which thus would hide the cost of generating this list)? It seems to be generated again every time I click that dropdown menu.

Here's a log file from a session where I booted to an empty layout, opened a search panel to Bible search, and clicked the "Search in" dropdown: 36360.Logos4.log

One particularly troubling gap of 6 seconds is accounted for by the SyncManager -- why does Logos need to be syncing while it's in the middle of displaying a dropdown list? Or am I misreading the log file?

2011-04-22 17:08:06.0447    12    Info    SyncManager    (500ms) Downloading items.
2011-04-22 17:08:12.2110    1    Info    IsWorkingControl    Hiding IsWorkingControl (name  id 53855148)

Bradley Grainger said:

We've chosen to minimize mouse clicks and movement, at the expense of having a menu that populates dynamically. That is, this is by design.

And it's a good interface design. I'm not complaining about the fact that the menu is dynamic, just about how long it takes to generate the contents of it (and again here, I'm no longer talking about the context menu, since that performance problem seems to be gone). I hope the "Search in" dropdown can be sped up.

Bradley Grainger said:

Rosie Perera said:

Also, updating the library catalog after making a change to tags or a resource name is too slow ("Updating library catalog. List may be incomplete" message appears for 10-15 seconds).

This probably isn't multithreaded, but it could be. (There are a lot more multi-core computers now than when we released the software.)

Rosie Perera said:

And I get the frozen screen and "Not responding" for 20 seconds or more when I open a medium-sized somewhat complex clippings file (made up of one clipping for each of the tables of contents from the Early Church Fathers volumes, complete with their links) or try to scroll in it past a juncture between clippings. Ditto when I do "close all" when there are a lot of tabs open.

I haven't tried to reproduce this yet, but I noticed you posted your file on another thread, so we may be able to look at this.

One final thing: how many visual filters do you typically have enabled, and how many of them search for "*"? If you love to do that, just know that the system will not love you back... I would highly recommend disabling as many of those as you can.

I typically only have one visual filter enabled, if any. None of my visual filters search for "*". I have just turned them all off in all resources and restarted Logos and tried opening that clipping file again, and it didn't make any difference.

Graham Criddle said:

Dave Hooton said:

For a common word "the", the context menu populates quickly in EBC Intro and slowly in NET Bible & ESV bible.

I see the same. For example:

I've just right-clicked on the word "the" in John1:1 in the ESV (the "the" in "the Word was with God") and it took 22 seconds for the right-side of the context menu to fully populate.

Graham

Yup, I can confirm that. It's OK for most substantial words. Rarely would I be right-clicking on "a" or "the" in real usage, unless it had a typo in it that I wanted to report.

But in John 1:26, the word "one" which isn't as trivial as "a" or "the" takes just about as long to populate the right-hand side (5-6 seconds on my blazing fast machine). As usual, posting a log file for them (of a really simplified session reproducing the slow result) is more helpful than just saying it's slow. Here's mine (just opened to a blank layout, then opened ESV -- which was still open to John 1 from last time -- right clicked on "one" in John 1:26): 35655.Logos4.log

Just for a frame of reference, I did the same thing as Graham...clicking on "the" in the phrase "the word was God..."

It took (by my unscientific count) about 7 or 8 seconds to populate the right click menu fully...not very fast but faster than what's being posted here.

here are my logs if that would help

26836.Logos4.zip

Edited to add: I noticed in my log that there were a lot of syncing efforts going on....so I disabled "use internet" and tried rosies search (which took 8 seconds also) and the result was that my machine populated the menu in about 5 seconds.

Dave, Oh reader of the logos logs....what do mine show?

They didn't make any sense to me....

Dave Hooton said:

Robert Pavich said:

Dave, Oh reader of the logos logs....what do mine show?

That it took about 11 sec

Ok....so I count slow.... [:P]

Robert Pavich said:

Francis said:

Next time somewhat says something is going wrong with mouse clicks, I'm going to suggest they only use the keyboard!

Now THAT'S the spirit! Lol...

 

Indeed !  I propose that Logos be ported to DOS so we can make exclusive use of the keyboard.  [:D]

Rosie Perera said:

Graham Criddle said:

Dave Hooton said:For a common word "the", the context menu populates quickly in EBC Intro and slowly in NET Bible & ESV bible.

I see the same. For example:

I've just right-clicked on the word "the" in John1:1 in the ESV (the "the" in "the Word was with God") and it took 22 seconds for the right-side of the context menu to fully populate.

Graham

Yup, I can confirm that. It's OK for most substantial words. Rarely would I be right-clicking on "a" or "the" in real usage, unless it had a typo in it that I wanted to report.

But in John 1:26, the word "one" which isn't as trivial as "a" or "the" takes just about as long to populate the right-hand side (5-6 seconds on my blazing fast machine).

Weird. When I click on that same "the" (or that same "one") on my little Mac Mini with only 2GB of RAM, I get virtually the same result as Rosie! 6-7 secs at most, and the things I generally want are up by 2. Could it be faster? Sure. And if Rosie is to be believed, 4.3 is going to be faster. But considering how desperately slow many other things are, I've never even really noticed any slowness here, except when reporting typos.

Rosie Perera said:

I'm still concerned about the "Search in" dropdown in Bible Search, though. Why would that be any more complicated to generate than the list of dictionaries in the context menu for a word? It takes on the order of 8 seconds to display, and all that's in that dropdown is a list of all my collections and series that have Bibles in them. Can't that info be cached -- to be updated whenever the user edits a collection definition or downloads new resources (relatively infrequent operations which one might expect to take a bit longer than menu dropdown, and which thus would hide the cost of generating this list)? It seems to be generated again every time I click that dropdown menu.

The Search dropdowns, now, that's another matter altogether! It's frequently taken 30 -- yes, that's thirty -- seconds before I can choose a Bible or collection to search. Seldom less than 15. Seems down to about 8 today, however, though I can't figure out a reason why it would be. It's been 11-12 days since I updated to SR 4, and I'm pretty certain it hasn't been faster for 12 days. And I can't remember seeing anything in the release notes about improvement here either. Well, if it isn't just a fluke, this is going to be a big help; that dropdown was driving me crazy! Not that 8 is great, but after dealing with 30 it's a huge improvement.

Rosie Perera said:

I'm not sure how many of them are actually using Logos on a day-to-day basis as much as we are, so they might not notice and be frustrated by these things like we are.

"using Logos on a day-to-day basis as much as we are"? You mean you actually manage to use Logos? I spend pretty much my whole days by the computer, and I seldom manage to get more than 1-2 hours of actual use out of Logos in a week. The rest of the time is wasted on bugs and workarounds.

Dave Hooton said:

So my main issue is with persistent bugs, regression bugs (those fixed in an earlier release!) and a lack of functionality (not necessarily features)

Even I, who definitely find Logos slow, find these things even worse. The slowness may cost me 15-30 minutes a day; the bugs and all the tiny things that should be there but aren't, easily cost me 5-10 hours a day.

Hi Rosie, I see that you too have an "Unnamed Collection."  I like mine so much that I sometimes have Unnamed Collection (2) and Unnamed Collection (3). ;-)

George Somsel said:

Rosie Perera said:

I forgot to post the list of all my collections -- it might be interesting for you to see how someone is using collections. Here it is:
1031.All My Collections (as of 2011-04-22).doc

Good grief !  How do you keep track of all of them?  What are you trying for -- a collection for each and every book ?

They all show up in my Collections dropdown menu. Not a problem to keep track of them. When you have 6100+ books in your library, as I do, some sort of mental scheme for keeping track of what books you have is necessary. That's what I use my collections for mostly. Think of it kind of like organizing your shelves in a physical library by topic, although with my Logos collections books can appear in more than one shelf, which can be handy for interdisciplinary books.

Todd Phillips said:

Here's mine: 8055.collections110425.doc

I only have 92, but then again I only have 2014 resources.  I use them the same way you do, Rosie, but I do find that most of them have been useful for doing focused searches.

Great to see someone else who thinks like I do. [:)]

Yes, I do focused searches in most of them as well. I find the particular author ones especially useful for that. I do wish it were possible to make collections of all the works of a particular author including when some of them are only part of another resource (a chapter in a multi-author book or an article in a Journal) and have the search really limit to only that part of the resource that's by that author.

My, my, this has gotten way off of the initial topic of the thread! Not so much hijacked as just gradually slipped off the rails. Oops! [:O]

Rosie Perera said:

MJ. Smith said:

I don't see an easy way of counting the collections or capturing their titles.

I captured mine from the dropdown menu using the great little screen capture OCR utility called ABBYY Screenshot Reader

I used the SQLite command-line shell to open the ResourceCollectionManager.db.  Then I executed the follow SQL statement:

select title from ResourceCollections order by title;

And copied the results to a Word doc.