Slow typing when editing files in EagleFiler

[vdanen]

I’ve got the latest EagleFiler 1.5.10 and I routinely create files in EF and edit them in EF (using the preview pane, I guess you might call it). Lately (well, the last few months), it’s been slow to type. Typically these are RTF files as there is a button for it (why oh why isn’t there a “New Plaintext” icon on the toolbar?). When I type, EF plays catchup – it’s not as smooth as typing in a browser, text editor, mail client or anywhere else for that matter. There’s always a lag when I do so.

Is it the size of my library? I know EF can handle multi-GB libraries (mine is almost 10GB) and has:

% find Files -type f|wc -l
6589
% find Files -type d|wc -l
588

Is that too much? I’ve used some of esoteric preferences to try to speed things up:

CalculateFolderSizes: off
ExcludeIndexesFromBackup: off
MarkNewRecordsAsUnread: off
PrefersRichText: off (as a side note, it would be really slick if the “New RTF” button in the toolbar reflected this preference, I always click that or CMD-N… maybe inverting CMD-N vs CTRL-CMD-N based on this preference?)

Should I split this library into two or three libraries? I know some stuff I could easily move to another one if it would help (not as frequently accessed things like PDFs and e-books), but I quite enjoy having one library to rule them all. =) I do have two additional libraries (one exclusively as an email archive, and another for my business receipts/invoices/etc PDFs).

I’d really like EF to be smooth when using the built-in editor; it saves me from using an external editor to edit files just by being able to edit them in-place. IIRC it wasn’t always like this, but I’ve been using EF for years and I can’t honestly say at what point it changed – whether an OS upgrade, the library getting larger, or a particular EF version. The only other thing that may be of note is that my library folder (Filed Documents) has a .git and .gitignore file in it (I’ve got my library living in a git repo). I don’t know if this has any impact on things or not. Ahh… just looked at the size of “Filed Documents/.git” and it’s 4.5GB, so my library must really be only about 5GB and not 10GB.

I’m toying with possibly moving my library onto Dropbox instead of using git, but I don’t think git is the source of the problem (I’ve only been doing that fairly recently).

Any advice or things I can try to speed the editing up? Otherwise it runs pretty quick (just the editing of .txt or .rtf files is slow).

Thanks!

[Michael_Tsai]

@vdanen

Lately (well, the last few months), it’s been slow to type.

I would not expect the size of the library to have any impact on the speed of the editor. Is there something else going on when you’re typing, e.g. in EagleFiler’s Activity window? Please use Activity Monitor to record a sample report so that I can see what it’s spending time on while you’re typing.

[vdanen]

@Michael_Tsai

I would not expect the size of the library to have any impact on the speed of the editor. Is there something else going on when you’re typing, e.g. in EagleFiler’s Activity window? Please use Activity Monitor to record a sample report so that I can see what it’s spending time on while you’re typing.

That was interesting. The sampling doesn’t last long, but I did manage to get one. I’ll send it to you via email.

Activity window has nothing in it.

This is pretty much a constant thing. I don’t seem to have Snapz Pro installed right now, so I’m going to install it this afternoon or evening and do a little video of the typing. It’s not constantly slow, but it does have it’s hiccups and slowdowns. I’ll post back once I have something recorded, but in the meantime I’ll send you the sample.

FWIW, EagleFiler CPU is about 0.6% usage, 10 threads, using 111.7MB real memory and 192.1MB virtual memory. The system is a 2 x 2.4GHz quad-core xeon (Mid 2010 Mac Pro) with 32GB RAM. The EagleFiler application is on the main SSD drive, while the library itself is on a RAID volume (6TB, only 2.3TB used).

[Michael_Tsai]

@vdanen

The sampling doesn’t last long, but I did manage to get one. I’ll send it to you via email.

Thanks for sending the sample. It looks like the slowness may be caused by EagleFiler waiting for some information from the OS in order to populate the “Open With” submenu. I’ll look into this more next week.

I don’t think it’s necessary to send a video; I can imagine what slow typing looks like.

[vdanen]

@Michael_Tsai

Thanks for sending the sample. It looks like the slowness may be caused by EagleFiler waiting for some information from the OS in order to populate the “Open With” submenu. I’ll look into this more next week.

I don’t think it’s necessary to send a video; I can imagine what slow typing looks like.

Heh, fair enough. Yeah, I’m not sure what it is, but the only real slow-down is when typing in the built-in editor. Everything else is fast and works good, just the typing is slow.

[Michael_Tsai]

It looks like the slowness is due to a change in Mountain Lion that makes EagleFiler’s “Open With” submenu much slower. I will work on optimizing this for the next version.

[Michael_Tsai]

@vdanen

Lately (well, the last few months), it’s been slow to type. Typically these are RTF files as there is a button for it (why oh why isn’t there a “New Plaintext” icon on the toolbar?).

This is fixed in EagleFiler 1.6. And there’s also a new toolbar button for creating plain text files.