OpenAndSavePanelService freezes and uses substantial CPU (~88%)

Not sure if it’s relevant but I experience a much longer wait time on opening/saving a 5MB Excel (365 latest version) after upgrading to macOS 10.15.5. But I’m not sure whether the bugs only occurs to SSD (my Mac is SSD). So, the issue is perhaps very much Apple’s responsibility.

Hi, I was able to take the time to reinstall Catalina. Unfortunately, this does not correct the issue with the OpenAndSavePanelService, and I am reporting this to Apple. DevonThink continues to temporarily lock up when I attempt to sue the OpenAndSavePanelService to open or save a file in DevonThink. Fortunately, it is rare that I have to use the service to open databases. I have recently had this and an issue with Dropbox following my upgrade to Catalina 10.15.4 (I am now at 10.15.5). Fortunately, DevonThink is really well-designed and has largely continued to work very well save for the OpenAndSavePanelService. I doubt the Dropbox issue is related; however, while my DevonThink databases continue to synchronize via Dropbox while all of my remaining Dropbox folders stopped correctly synchronizing with the on-line Dropbox system. (They, unfortunately, are not helpful.) I only bring up Dropbox because both it and the OpenAndSavePanelService relate to file storage.

Thanks for the info and follow-up. It’s indeed an odd problem and sadly, less surprising than it should be because of Catalina’s less than stellar quality.

See this comment about Spotlight:

This isn’t necessarily the “answer”, but something you may look into.

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Hi, I’ll test this. Whatever is causing the issue is apparently not a single “event”. Monitoring the process suggests that each panel freeze is accompanied by 4–5 “hangs,” although I am not sure if each increment in the hang count in the process monitor panel for the service is a unique event or just related to some kind of repeated sampling.

Thanks for any help or info as we still can’t reproduce this.

Do you happen to have a very large number of tags in your databases?

Solved the issue by removing the database which contained a large number of tags (close to 20k) from Spotlight index.

How would one bulk delete tags from the database without actually deleting tagged content?

Thanks.

E.g. search for all tagged items via the advanced search, then use Tools > Batch Processing… and the Remove All Tags action.

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If you just want to remove the Tags groups, select them in the Tags group for the database and press Command-Delete to move them to the database’s Trash. Then empty the Trash.

Note: This does not remove the files from the database.

Thanks @cgrunenberg and @BLUEFROG. Got rid of all the tags which all came out of RSS feeds and deactivated tags conversion on import. Smooth flight so far.

You’re welcome and glad to hear it.
I honestly have never seen databases with more than 2000 Tags, so this was definitely eye-opening. :slight_smile:

It can happen very easily if you use DT3 regularly as an RSS news reader.

I’m very selective in the feeds I put into a database, so I guess I’ve never run into this.

I can understand that with regard to a permanent database on a given topic.

What I have found is that aside from all the “serious” uses of DT3 for professional documents and research, it is very useful as an RSS reader for more casual reading as well of mainstream news/personal interest feeds; this is particularly helpful given the new SmartRule features to add tags identifying the source of an item and identifying any other keywords of interest in the item.

So the result is one Smart Group continually updated during the day with all sorts of articles on various topics as well as tags to help further fine-tune which items may be of interest to read.

It can quikly evolve into a very large database, but it is also just as easy to delete older stuff from time to time. It runs all day in a separate window on my Mac and does not meaningfully impact performance of DT3 or of the computer itself otherwise.

for more casual reading as well of mainstream news/personal interest feeds

I avoid mainstream news like I avoid liver. (And yes, I hate liver :stuck_out_tongue: :wink: ).

I tend to rabbit-trail on my own, following my own curiosities and instincts.

I definitely have this same issue. Except in my case it is MUCH worse. I have 238,642 tags that have been generated from the hashtags in hundreds of RSS feeds; most of which I never read.

I have also seen extremely slowness in file save and open dialog boxes - I believe caused by this functionality interfering with Finder itself.

Now I need to first find a way in DEVONthink to clean up the RSS feeds that I have so that I can eliminate the ones I never use or read, then clean up the tags. I have already told it to stop creating tags from keywords or hashtags, but that only keeps things from continuing to go downhill. It does not correct the current problem.

If there is anything that could be added to the product that would prevent this problem, I would like to hear it. Perhaps storing tags in such a way that they’re in DEVONthink only and not part of the Finder or the OS? Or at the very least a way to have the conversion of hashtags and keywords into tags be prevented with RSS feeds?

Any crazy thoughts? :slight_smile:

Well, that’s set in the preferences for RSS feeds. If you allowed over a quarter million tags to be created from RSS feeds and you didn’t notice that was happening, what would you suggest that DEVONthink could have done differently to prevent that?

Allowed? Not like I anticipated so many tags being created. Nor did I anticipate the interaction between large numbers of tags and the OS itself.

It’s not about anticipating anything. The tags were not created overnight. I’m just saying if you didn’t notice what was happening over the weeks, months, years that it took to create a quarter million tags, then what safeguards could DEVONthink do to have prevented this?

As to rectifying the current situation, do you still have all the RSS feed articles in the database that it took to generated 250k feeds? How much of your database is data that you have carefully curated and how much is junk from RSS feeds? It might be easier to move all your important data to a new database and delete the current database with hundreds of thousands of unwanted RSS feed articles and tags.

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