DTTG 4 is very laggy

DEVONthink To Go
1

Another issue I have since the switch of DTTG 4.0.0 is: It has become extremely laggy.

Currently I’m running 4.0.3 on an iPhone 16 Pro Max with 500 GB free disk space. It doesn’t matter whether I

  • open a note
  • open a note‘s context menu
  • view the content of a note an scroll up and down in
    • viewing or
    • editing mode
  • create a new note
  • open a folder/group
  • scroll through a group’s content
  • open other files such as images, PDF…
  • open the inbox
  • try to copy the shared link of a note
  • search for files
  • … actually the entire app usage is affect

I tried to record the issue. In the movie linked below, I just create a new note, view its info, and edit it. The video is recorded in realtime and I did not leave my phone in the meantime. I just tried to use the app and was confronted with instant lags:

YouTube link

I tried already to

  • deactivate Wiki Links: no effect.
  • deactivate File Versioning: no effect.
  • deactivate Spotlight Indexing: no effect.
  • deactivate all Markdown plugins (Mathjax, mermaid, …): no effect.
  • restart the app: no effect
  • restart the phone: no effect

What I have not tried is

  • to un- and re-install the app
  • to delete and redownload my database

Do you have any tipps for me? Would you recommend to reinstall the app entirely to have a fresh re-initialization since I migrated from DTTG 3 to DTTG 4? Or is this a known issue?

2 Likes
2

No, there aren’t any known issues we can confirm. How large are your databases?

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3

It’s quite large: ~50 GB with ~130k files.

4

And are there large files say > 15 mb?

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5

And how many groups and tags? Any smart groups?

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6

Christian, do the amount of tags affect much to the performance of DTTG? Because I’m rebuilding my databases with a zillion of AI generated tags. If yes, is there any way to not to sync them to DTTG?

BTW, I had to disconnect import and export Tags to Finder because it went extremely slow and I had to manually remove them.

Thanks.

7

More than few thousand unique tags aren’t recommended if tags are mirrored to the Finder.

That’s not possible, databases are always completely synchronized.

1 Like
8

See…

2 Likes
9

Yes, there are file >15 GB. Btw, I had no problems with the same database in DTTG 3.

Today, I started to shift groups with many media files (images, PDF) into an extra “Media” database in order to reduce both file size of and number of files in my main database. I will report whether this will have an effect.

10

~4300 groups. These groups are also my tags. I’m not using explicit tags, but turned on “inherit tags from groups”/“Tags von Gruppen vererben”.

11

Group tags are not the same as inherited tags.

  • Group tags are the group name applied as tags to the child items of the group, e.g., a document in a group named Project X would have the group tag Project X.
  • Inherited tags apply tags on a group to its children, e.g., given the group named Project X with a tag On Hold, its children would get the inherited On Hold tag but not a tag of Project X.

Logically, you could enable both options in the Database Properties and have both the group and inherited tags applied to the child items.

1 Like
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Do you use automatic Wiki linking too?

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I have the same ~5000 tags in one DB here - AI-generated. Opening PDF files makes DTTG 4 freeze after a couple of seconds. I had the same problem without the AI-generated tags in DTTG 3 as well. Maybe it’s the same problem?

1 Like
14

Yes.

15

You don’t find 5,000 tags in a database of concern?

16

You know DTTG 4 way better than me. :slight_smile: So, if you ask me this way, sure, that might be a problem.

From a users perspective: It’s just a tag. I’ve never thought about having 1000, 5000 or 10.000 tags.

For now, adding tags by AI is just an experiment for me. All al prefixed with ai- and can be be deleted with a click.

17

Since many are mobile and Mac, we have to be concerned about effects (and features) on both platforms, so…

18

I’ve also found DTTG 4 to be very sluggish, often stalling for so long that I restart it.

I’ve already deleted my largest database (30GB), the rest of my databases have about 23 GB combined. I think performance has improved, but I’m not sure yet. And I would really like to be able to have all my databases on mobile too.

Smart groups

I don’t have a large number of smart groups. Most are just the built-in ones like All PDFs or Duplicates.

When I had a peek at console.log I noticed there are many entries like:
STOPWATCH: Fetched results for query <kind:pdf> in 2.7454 seconds

So I wonder if DTTG is really running all the smart group searches every few minutes. Wouldn’t it make more sense to only run a search when the smart group is opened? Since the number of results for each smart group isn’t shown in the sidebar anyway?

19

Meanwhile, I shifted some large media file groups (mostly images and pdf) into a separate database which reduced my main DB from ~50 GB with ~130k files in ~4300 groups to ~29 GB with ~81k files in ~3300 groups. So far, I did not notice any performance improvement.

If the issue is related to the database size, it either doesn’t scale linearly or I still need to shift more to see an effect.

However, I should also mention that the separate DB, into which I shifted the media files, is also synched to DTTG. So, it could be that DTTG remains laggy anyways as it processes all files across all synchronized databases collectively?

20

…short intermediate update: It could be that the result of my database shifting has not taken full effect yet. DTTG is still running a background process, where it seems to clean up the ~50k files that were shifted out of my main DB. I’ll give you an update as soon as this process is finished.