SpamSieve 3 is way too slow

SpamSieve
,
1

I upgraded, and 3 locked up - I’ve had to force quit it every time. I did the upgrade and then tried installing it from the dmg. I’ve had to turn it off.
I’m on Mojave on a mid-2010 Mac Pro with 48Gb memory and 12 cores - its old and yet it still works til I can afford a new box.
Any thoughts/suggestions?

2

In general, I would expect SpamSieve 3 to be faster than version 2, so something may be amiss. The next time it locks up, please record a sample log.

3

Thanks! I just spent over 1/2 hour reconfiguring and getting sample logs (that’s how bad the performance is, the apps lock up for minutes at a time) which I’ve emailed to the address in the manual page you provided.

4

Thanks for the sample logs. It looks like the source of the slowness is SpamSieve waiting on your Mac’s storage to read its databases. Does this Mac perhaps have a spinning hard drive rather than an SSD?

It is actually still finishing some launch tasks in the second sample that you sent.

There are probably a variety of things that can be done to address this, but for some initial suggestions:

  • Try clicking this link to turn off some automatic diagnostic checks that SpamSieve does at launch.

  • Try unchecking Prune full message data in log in the Storage settings.

  • Quit the app and open the folder /Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/SpamSieve/. Inside there should be a folder called Log.spamsieve-logd. Try renaming this to OldLog.spamsieve-logd. SpamSieve will start a new log database without all the old imported data, which is not needed for filtering accuracy.

5

Thanks! I’ve emailed a new sample log.

Those changes made startup pretty much like any other app, so those worked. And it improved processing performance, but not nearly enough - I got one email processed in about 5 minutes, and SpamSieve kept going into unresponsive in Activity Monitor. So I took a sample about a minute or two in, hope that helps. Now the cycle time to turn on/off is less than 5 minutes so its testable now :slight_smile:

And yes, that’s the original spinning HD when I bought the computer in late 2010 - yes, I need to upgrade, and yes, I’m saving for a Studio.

6

Thanks for the sample. Some other ways to speed it up:

  • Click this link and this link, which will reduce the amount of auto-training done. As a longtime user, you probably already have it well trained, anyway.

  • Click this link, which will turn off the saving of extra diagnostic information to the database that helps in troubleshooting crashes.

7

I applied those three changes, restarted SpamSieve, turned it back on, and I’ve emailed yet another sample log (YASL :slight_smile: ). I hit sample right after starting to download mail from Mail. SpamSieve kept going unresponsive and then responsive. I got one email in a regular folder, and nothing in the Spam folder (there were a few emails waiting to process).

8

With your latest sample, the main source of the slowness seems to be reading the corpus database during filtering. This is an area where an SSD makes a huge difference. Since your Mac has tons of RAM, though, it may help to increase the memory cache size, which you can do by clicking this link.

If that is not sufficient to make it fast, please use the Save Diagnostic Report command in the Help menu and send me the report file, as described here. I can see whether there’s anything else going on and can help you prune the corpus. (This is not yet possible within the app directly. I’m working on a feature to prune it automatically, but that’s not quite ready yet.)

9

Done and still slow - emailed you the diagnostic and some additional info, its very strange what I’m seeing. Hope all that helps. And thanks!

10

As I recall, we were able to get it working for you by pruning the corpus. There are also some changes in SpamSieve 3.0.1b3 to improve the launch time.