Do you think that my MacBookPro Late Oct 2013 can run DevonThink 3

I have a MBP Pro that is a little long the tooth. Often when I try and run DT the system ends up hanging. Is it just not powerful enough or should it be able to run it without having to close down everything that I have running?

I keep waiting to grade my system but Apple keeps pushing out systems that i want to buy.

All of my Docs are in the cloud and I just use DT as an index and to OCR the docs.

What are my options, Wait for the new Apple Silicon systems?, Buy an iPad Pro and hope for a quick update to the DT that runs on the ipad? Just use really small data sets?

I was thinking of getting a mac mini and somehow use that as my database server. Is that really practical? Would it really offload enough?

Do you think that with the newer systems and the faster memory, one could get by with just 16gb of memory?

Current system

Hardware Overview:

Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro11,1
Processor Name: Dual-Core Intel Core i5
Processor Speed: 2.4 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 2
L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB
L3 Cache: 3 MB
Hyper-Threading Technology: Enabled
Memory: 16 GB
Boot ROM Version: MBP111.0142.B00
SMC Version (system): 2.16f68
Serial Number (system): C02M214VFH04
Hardware UUID: 8F3CDA7D-35F1-572D-9629-281B975780F1

I have the first Retina of 2012 with 8GB of RAM and 512 of disk and DT works fine. A little bit slower than in my 2017 iMac. Mine has 8GB and yours has 16GB. Mine is an i7-4core, yours is a i5-2core… I think it will work at least as fast as mine.

However, I only have 5 databases open, not the entire 15 I have (mostly because do not fit in disk).

My first MacBook Pro, a mid 2012 machine (Apple’s basis configuration, upgraded to 16 GB RAM and 1 TB SSD), dual core Intel i5 as well with 2.5 GHz, is a working horse for so many years now. It runs OSX 10.14.x Mojave, Catalina is supported by the machine but not installed.

No problems to deal with parallel 8 databases from several 100 MB to two ones with nearly 50.000 files and 7 resp. 10 GB of data in it (imported data).

The biggest “problem” is the small 13 inch screen as I’m used to my iMac with 5k display so much … :wink:

I run DT3 on a 2010 iMac running HS without issues.

I’ve got the same machine as you do except that I’ve got 8 GB of RAM, and DEVONthink 3.52 works perfectly. None of my databases are indexed, all are local.

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Welcome @sgtaylor5
Thanks for the input.

This almost seems like the indexing is your problem. I also run DT3 on a 2014 Mac Mini with 8GB RAM. To complicate things further, I boot off of a USB 3 SSD hard drive because it’s easier than cracking it open to replace the spinning drive. I never have any issues with DT and usually have 3-4 databases open syncing upwards of 5GB with my NAS. I was also using the same computer to run a CNC machine and never lost a connection with the electronics or had any kind of stutter, so I would say the computer is easily capable. The only difference between your setup and others is that you are indexing…

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But 5 GB is a very small db.

Is there a recommendation for the max size of db for M1 16GB of memory

The size doesn’t matter (assuming there’s enough disk space) but usually not more than 300.000 items and 3000 million words are recommended per database (see File > Database Properties). Higher values are of course possible (e.g. the largest ones I’ve seen so far are millions of items and billions of words) but can affect the performance, especially if there’s not enough real memory.

I have 15 opened databases, biggest has 5087 items, but has 4M of unique words (a lot of garbage from OCR) and 361M of words. Tiniest has 1266 items, 2K and 11K words.

First full search in all databases after opening app/db takes two or three seconds, next ones are almost immediate in my MBA M1 (16GB RAM, 1 TB disk), and takes a little bit more in my Intel MBP (16GB, 1 TB). What takes about 6 seconds is move between selected items with “See Alsto & Classify” sidebar (with that closed or opened in other window, movement is immediate).

I dream my Windows search box field in File Explorer will work only 10th slower than that with 100x less files.

My wife does not say that…

I guess it’s the wrong forum to discuss this here :laughing:

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