TIP - Want better performance? Close the "Text Comparison" window.

If you want to improve your usage experience of Logos 4 Mac here is a tip.

Unless you are specifically using the 'Text Comparison' tool shut it down.

You can read a long discussion about the issue on this thread but basically the problem is that if the text comparison tool is open (and it is opened in the default Logos layout) and if the verse selector for a Bible version is a whole book (see first screenshot) instead of a specific verse, or verses, then the performance of Logos will become very bad.

You likely will see the OS X spinning beach ball, and you may even think Logos has crashed because it has become non-responsive.

Also, as you use Logos 4, it may be that you start with a specific verse in the verse selector, but in some cases Logos 4 will change that by itself to show a whole book of the Bible. Result = performance loss.

Also if you have a saved layout that a) uses the text comparison tool and b) the saved verse in the layout is a whole book of the Bible, you will see it takes a very very long time to load the layout.

So, the text comparison tool is useful, but you need to be aware of the potential issues with it — hopefully Logos will fix the problem in the future.

SOME TECHNICAL INFO

When Logos 4 is attempting to fill the text comparison window it does not use all the capability of your Mac. I have recently done a computer refresh and have the most powerful iMac with latest Intel processor (3.4 GHz Intel Core i7) with 4 cores, with Hyper-Threading 8 cores (4 physical, 4 hyper thread) with 8GB of RAM.

But all that horsepower doesn't matter, because when Logos 4 is running the code to fill the text comparison window it only uses one CPU core — and that single core quickly reaches 100% which results in the beach ball, see second screenshot. BTW the software shown is called iStat Menus (http://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus/), it has number of nice features (I have no affiliation with them).