OpenAndSavePanelService freezes and uses substantial CPU (~88%)

DEVONthink
41

Something that would have been potentially helpful would have been a popup alert when the first 1,000 tags were created from RSS feeds. Perhaps it could have said something like this: “Over 1,000 tags have now been created from the 300 RSS feeds to which you subscribe. Such a high number of tags can result in significant slowdowns in file open and save operations in macOS. Do you wish to update your RSS Feed Preferences to prevent tags from being created automatically?”

If the user clicks , the preference is turned off right then and there.

Even a notice in the help documentation would have been better. There are no best practice warnings in the docs that mentioned that automatically generating tags from hundreds of RSS Feeds can create hundreds of thousands of tags AND that having more than 1000 tags in macOS can slow Finder to a crawl. I like to save the content of feeds that I like, specifically because they vanish from the Internet after a time.

There’s no mention of architectural limitations, which I would really like to have called out. Best Practice guides, things to avoid, things to do to get the best experience.

42

That brings up a good question:

If I clear out the articles with the tags, will that also clear the tag entries from the macOS file system? If so, great! That should solve the problem, since it is caused by Finder trying to process hundreds of thousands of file system tags. If not, then that will help, but won’t solve the root of the problem, until I can delete the tag list from Finder itself.

43

If I clear out the articles with the tags, will that also clear the tag entries from the macOS file system?

No, this will not happen. Also, the Tags in the database will not be removed.

There are no best practice warnings in the docs that mentioned that automatically generating tags from hundreds of RSS Feeds can create hundreds of thousands of tags

Development could also comment on this but I would say having 300+ RSS feeds would be an unusually high number. In conjunction with the conversion of categories and hashtags enabled, this situation in not unexpected over the course of time.

44

The number of feeds isn’t unusual but the huge amount of different hashtags definitely is. What kind of feeds did you add? You could remove all tags by using e.g. the Remove All Tags action of Tools > Batch Processing…, this should remove the Finder tags too.

45

Hi all,

Thank you very much for reaching out to me to help! I just wanted to respond and let you all know the status of my situation, since you took the time to help out.

I went ahead and deleted thousands of extra articles and several hundred duplicate RSS feeds that had been added through imports from Fever RSS reader. That had a modest impact on system performance. However, things still were taking up to 15 seconds just to get a save dialog box, sometimes longer.

Then I took @cgrunenberg’s advice and used the new Batch Processing option to remove all tags from these Feeds.

That helped more, but I was still left with nearly 7000 tags. I then noticed, in a Finder search for a tag that I knew was not mine, that there was a DEVONthink metadata folder in my library that was holding metadata for the old feed articles that I had already deleted: Macintosh HD/Users/xxxxx/Library/Metadata/com.devon-technologies.think3

I decided to delete the old metadata folder and have DT regenerate the metadata folder. That did the trick!

I let my system run all night removing the extraneous tags from Finder and then rebooted in the morning.

Things are working AMAZINGLY now. That was a huge win!

I still have around 1,064 tags, but performance is now like a new Mac.

Evidently, when the tags in Finder get to be around 5,000 or so is when I started seeing a performance hit. I’m sure that varies depending on system speed, but it’s nice to know the limitations.

It still might be nice to have some sort of warning somewhere that subscribing to hundreds of RSS Feeds may result in thousands of hashtags being added, which could in turn heavily burden Finder performance.

Just a thought. :slight_smile: Thank you all again!

46

The Spotlight index should be updated in the background, therefore changes might not immediately be visible in the Finder. But I’ll check that this does indeed work after removing all tags as suggested.

47

It’s indeed a bug, the next maintenance release will fix this.

48

Rock on! Thanks!

:wink: Do I get a DEVONthink mug for finding a bug?

49

Surely a face mask would be more en vogue - it could be imprinted with DEVONthink mug if you wanted :crazy_face:

50

No. 776 tags. Unlike others below the number of tags is very low on my system.

51

Yes, and they were no help. The iCloud process, bird, reliably is involved in the panel freeze.

52

I had this problem for ~5 years and this thread finally solved it for me! And it had nothing to do with RSS — my database simply has 5,000 hand-generated tags. I would strongly suggest that the potential effects on the entire OS of adding so many tags should be documented somewhere.

53

This is a good suggestion, @BLUEFROG. But maybe it would be also a good idea to report such things via the Feedback Assistant to Apple so that they will eventually fix this bottleneck. The more reports the better.

54

Noted.

55

Are you using Spotlight with your DEVONthink databases?