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Still Delay in Displaying Ranked Search Results

Home>Logos Desktop Beta>Still Delay in Displaying Ranked Search Results

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Jason Van Vliet | Forum Activity | Posted: Thu, Jul 2 2015 8:36 AM

This issue could also be posted in the General Logos forum because it is still there in 6.4 which has now been released.  However, since the discussion started in this forum (https://community.logos.com/forums/t/101889.aspx) I thought I would continue it here.  I am still experiencing a delay in the display of certain search results.  I should immediately add that, so far as I can recall, this delay was not there prior to 6.1, which was a release focussed on performance.  Things were improved, to a degree, in 6.3, but they are still problematic in my experience and the issue remains in 6.4.

I should emphasize that my problem is not with the speed of the search itself, which is always very quick, but with the display of the search hits.  Here is my experience in summary fashion:

  • All Bible searches with any display view (Grid, Verses, Aligned, Analysis) complete and display very quickly.  Thank-you for that!
  • A Basic search in "All Resources" or a collection, with the "By Resource" view chosen, completes and displays quickly.
  • A Basic search in "All Resources" or a collection, with the "By Count" view chosen, completes and displays quickly.
  • A Basic search in "All Resources" or a collection, with the "Ranked" view chosen, completes the search quickly but has a very noticeable lag before displaying the hits. 

Obviously the problem is with the fourth bullet point.  To my observation the issue seems to be that Logos is "huffing and puffing" to sort and rank the results. Or perhaps the extra delay is because Logos has to retrieve the text preview excerpts, which are displayed by default in the Ranked view but require click on a triangle to expand in the By Resource and By Count views.  I'm not sure where the lag is coming from, but it would seem to me it is one of those two areas.

Since 6.3 this lag does not reach the point of having the title bar display "(Not Responding)" as often as it did in 6.1 and 6.2.  However, what baffles me is why I never seemed to have any problem with the display of ranked results in 6.0.  So far as I can recall, it only began after the performance update of 6.1, and I can consistently reproduce the problem after that.

Is Logos still working on this problem, or is there some technical issue that prevents recapturing the same performance that we used to enjoy for Basic searches with ranked results that we had in 6.0?

If anyone can shed light on the situation that would be appreciated.  And once again, thanks for all your hard work.  It is appreciated.  Logos continues to be a fantastic piece of software.

PS I'm on Windows 8.1

Posts 9195
LogosEmployee
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Bradley Grainger (Faithlife) | Forum Activity | Replied: Thu, Jul 2 2015 8:58 AM

Jason Van Vliet:
A Basic search in "All Resources" or a collection, with the "Ranked" view chosen, completes the search quickly but has a very noticeable lag before displaying the hits.

I'm not able to reproduce this; could you post a screencast?

Posts 47
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Jason Van Vliet | Forum Activity | Replied: Thu, Jul 2 2015 9:09 AM

Sure, I'd be more than willing to do that.  What's the best way to do it?  I haven't really done a screencast before, but I suppose it's not hard to learn.

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Bradley Grainger (Faithlife) | Forum Activity | Replied: Thu, Jul 2 2015 9:10 AM

I've found Jing to be a free, easy way to take screencasts and publish them to the web: https://www.techsmith.com/jing.html 

Posts 47
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Jason Van Vliet | Forum Activity | Replied: Thu, Jul 2 2015 9:32 AM

OK.  I figured out the screencast.  Below are two of them to compare and contrast.  A few things worth noting:

  • Both searches are done in my Reference collection, which is a group of key dictionaries and encyclopedias that I commonly use.  It has a total of 57 resources in it, so it's not an overly large collection.
  • Each time I did the search immediately after launching Logos to keep things consistent and ensure that there was not data in a cache somewhere.  In other words, between the Ranked screencast and the By Resource one I shut Logos down and restarted.
  • You'll notice that significant delay in displaying the results in the Ranked screencast, even though it says that it has completed the search in a fraction of a second.  In fact, it takes a number of seconds before it displays.  (The dreaded "Not Responding" even flashes briefly.)  By contrast, there is no lag to speak of in the By Resource screencast.

Search for "Bucer" with "Ranked" Results display

http://screencast.com/t/OdUjEjNzYSu

Search for "Bucer" with "By Resource" Results display

http://screencast.com/t/e4e4e3xgMY

I hope this helps diagnose the problem.  And if I can help in any other way, please let me know.

Posts 9195
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Bradley Grainger (Faithlife) | Forum Activity | Replied: Thu, Jul 2 2015 9:52 AM

Thanks, I think that's enough for us to go on right now.

Posts 47
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Jason Van Vliet | Forum Activity | Replied: Thu, Jul 2 2015 10:26 AM

OK, I hope you're able to come up with a solution.  That would be great.

Posts 47
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Jason Van Vliet | Forum Activity | Replied: Tue, Jul 7 2015 9:33 AM

Hi Bradley,

Here's another clue to the Delayed Search Results puzzle which may help you.  If we stay with the same example as in the screencast, that is, searching for "Bucer", then Logos functions in a slightly different way in each of the following two scenarios:

  • Search for "Bucer" with the results display set for "By Resource".  As mentioned previously, the results display populates almost instantly.  Now, without doing anything else, simply click on "Ranked" to change the display of the results.  You'll notice that it begins to populate almost immediately, however, the little pulsing squares icon appears next to Library Results indicating that behind the scenes and further down the results list Logos is still populating.  However, because Logos has filled at least one screen full of search results, I'm a happy user because I can begin looking at the results, deciding which one is best for my purposes.  In the meantime Logos fills up the rest of the list, which at that point is beyond my view, until I start to scroll down the list.
  • Search for "Bucer" with the results display set for "By Ranked".  Now Logos "huffs and puffs" to rank all the results before displaying them.  However, the little pulsing squares icon never appears.  It seems that Logos takes a different approach when you launch directly into a Ranked results search as compared to when you switch from Resource to Ranked.

Maybe (likely?) there's more going on behind the scenes, but from my point of view as a user, if Logos would only do what I described under the first bullet point all the time, it would be great.  So long as the first window full of results pops up almost immediately, I don't mind one bit if Logos keeps ranking things further down the list.  It will probably take me 5-10 secs looking at the first 10 results anyways, to decide if any of them are relevant for my purposes.

Well, if these comments help that's great.

Thanks.

Posts 47
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Jason Van Vliet | Forum Activity | Replied: Thu, Sep 17 2015 5:55 AM

Dear Bradley & Logos team,

I just switch to Logos 6.6, and I'm very thankful to report that the issue of the delay in displaying ranked search results is solved.  I didn't see a reference to this fix anywhere in the release notes (although perhaps I missed it).  However, the important thing is that it is fixed.  Now ranked search results begin to display immediately, while the program continues to rank and populate the results in the background.  Perfect!

Thanks so much.

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