Crashing, slowness—frustration.

I have used Logos 5 for about a year now and I will say that I do like it, as far as what it actually does. But I have become over-frustrated Super Angry at the amount of times that Logos crashes on my Macbook. In one forum I was told that Logos has a bug that causes it to crash when the Mac goes to sleep. That may be true, but it seems like Logos crashes more than that.

Slow! Logos is slow on my computer. I have 8gb of RAM and every click in Logos has a pause. It seems like the Mac design of the Logos product is not complete. It feels like a piece of software created for Windows and only half-rewritten to function in Mac, but not complete. Again, hear me, I like Logos the product and what I'm able to do with it, but the good of this software is overshadowed by the "clunkiness" of it.

If Logos functioned fluidly and smoothly as though it was a native Mac program, trust me, I would be singing it's praises! I have written some papers and prepared a sermon or two over the last year using Logos, and was very satisfied with what I was able to do in Logos, but many times I would lose all of my panes because I hadn't saved the layout and Logos decided to crash because I walked away long enough for my Mac to go to sleep. It is almost maddening sometimes!!!

I've invested at least $1000 in Logos software and resources, and I have to say at this point that I am very disappointed in the performance. I could almost wish that I would have never purchased it and had gone with something that functions more fluidly on my machine.

I recently purchased the original languages collection of another Bible software maker and will likely do my original language studies on that, reserving Logos mainly for the other resources/commentaries I own. And I'll likely access those on my iPad just so I don't have to open the Mac app. Sad

One more time, I really like the product, but the lack of performance completely overshadows everything good about the software. At this point, if I had only three words to describe the Logos app on Mac, they would be: crashing, slow, clunky.

I really hope a future release of Logos makes major leaps and bounds for the Mac program. If so, I will definitely start using it again.

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Comments

William Gabriel

Jon, I feel your pain--it can be frustrating to use the program on my Mac (it bit older, 2009, but the SSD and 8gb ram make it tolerable). The thing is, I have similar issues on my newer Windows machine (2 years old, 8 core @ 2.1GHz, 12 gb ram, Win7), so I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that Logos is doing a ton of stuff. I think part of it is that the UI work was approached last, and a lot of good UI practices just aren't there. It also doesn't help that they built the Mac version on Mono. Personally, I wish they had gone with Java from the start, but I think that would be impossible for an ex-Microsoft employee (and that doesn't automatically make your UI programming good, but it does solve the cross-platform issue).

Anyway, I actually came here to try and give you some hope. Logos has really expanded over the years, and that creates demands on your hardware. But I think we've probably gotten to the point that it won't expand a whole lot more. What I mean is, I can't see Logos adding feature after feature that will significantly slow the software down as we go forward. And they've even done good work between v4 and 5 in speeding it up. All that was to say that as our hardware gets better over time (as our old machines die off and we invest in the next generation), I have great hope that Logos will start to perform better. I anticipate hardware gains to exceed any potential Logos slowdown going forward. So while I often grumble to myself that it's not a great experience right now, I know that the investment in resources and in the platform should pay off in the future.

The other encouraging thing is that Logos works hard to make it better. They listen to the users and respond to bug reports and feature requests. A lot of great stuff has happened because they're a company that works with its users.

Jon crappel

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/571556#Comment_571556

William -- Thanks for your reply. I get it. Logos, with all of the resources it contains, is huge (almost 18gb on my machine). It is a significant challenge to overcome for the programmers. But to pay this amount of money, for this level of performance, is very frustrating. In the other software I bought I don't own the amount of resources that I do in Logos, but that program is lightning fast on my Mac. It uses all of the Mac interfaces very well and there is virtually zero lag time in doing things, especially searches. It will be interesting to see how it performs as my library grows.

I have Windows machines as well, but don't really use them for this work, so I can't speak to how Logos functions in Windows. I personally can deal with some lag time, for I've dealt with technology long enough to be patient. But if what you're saying about your Windows machine is true, with those specs, you really shouldn't be experiencing any issues I would think. 8 Cores and 12gb RAM is some major horsepower!

It seems that Logos has a long way to go in improving the efficiency of the processes of their app—in Windows and Mac. I just wish I had known that before I dropped so much money on what feels like Beta software.

Tom Philpot (Faithlife)

John,

I'm sorry you've had a poor experience with Logos on the Mac. I went into our crash reports database and the last crash reports from your user account are back in Dec 2013 on version 5.1a SR-2. Most of the crash reports we have from your systems were related to the sleep issue that we fixed in 5.2 SR-5 and the 5.2a betas. If you update to the latest 5.2 stable release, you might have better experience.

Also, several of the developers and testers monitor these forums regularly, so if you have specific reproducible crashes, posting here is a great way to bring them to our attention. We have a couple of systems for tracking crashes in the app that we actively monitor as well, but it never hurts to post here if there is a particular crash that you are experiencing.

In the same vein, if there are particular operations that are excessively slow, please post those as well. Our forum MVPs have a lot of tips for getting the most out of the software and sometimes a few tweaks are all it takes to make a huge difference.

Jon crappel

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/571566#Comment_571566

Tom -- Thanks for your reply. I am on 5.2 SR-6, and I can assure you that I am still experiencing crashes. You probably don't see crash reports because I've clicked out of sending them recently, just because I sometimes feel it's useless. Sorry, but every time I see the prompt to send a crash report it just reminds me that Logos crashed again. I'll start sending the crash reports again.

I don't mean to be a complainer. I want to like Logos. In fact, I do like Logos overall; the performance just makes it not very fun to use.

In general, I find that most things I do are slow. Something as simple as changing tabs can give me a spinning beach ball! And nearly every click has a noticeable pause. Again, I've worked in IT and have developed a patience for these things, so I have some tolerance for it. But when every click has a noticeable pause it tends to get overwhelming.

If I turn on any of the syncing pane options, or try to use some of the language tools that cause information to pop up as I scroll over words (like I see on those nifty videos), the software slows to the point of almost becoming unusable.

Tom Philpot (Faithlife)

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/571570#Comment_571570

Tom -- Thanks for your reply. I am on 5.2 SR-6, and I can assure you that I am still experiencing crashes. You probably don't see crash reports because I've clicked out of sending them recently, just because I sometimes feel it's useless. Sorry, but every time I see the prompt to send a crash report it just reminds me that Logos crashed again. I'll start sending the crash reports again.

Great. Thanks.

Yes, panel linking and the information panel can slow things down because they often have to go to the disk to retrieve information. If you have several panels all set to Link Set "Follow" every time you navigate to a different position in a resource, all the other panels in that link set will update, which could slow things down as the data is loaded from disk.

I find that if I set specific link sets for only the resources I need, e.g. ESV and BKC set to link set A, performance is much better. For the information panel, I set my settings to refresh on click, rather than hover, as that gives me explicit control over when the information is refreshed. While the auto-update of those panels is great, it's also one of the most performance intensive parts of the system.

(As an aside, an SSD can help, but judicious use of panel linking and information panel updates can go a long way too).