[MlMt] frequent crashes and freezes, + earlier keyboard lag
Hi -- I've been seeing a rising tide of unexpected quits and freezes (as in, spinning rainbow pizzas of death). The first sign of this was unexpected quits that happened when I tried to edit replies in GPG-encrypted conversations, but since then the problems have become much more common -- roughly 1 out of 3 times I interact with Mailmate at all, including something as simple as pulling clicking on a menubar counter. From time immemorial the generic advice for fixing this kind of problem for any app(lication) was: reinstall it! But I use Mailmate to check several accounts, so I'd really like to keep the amount of work involved to a bare minimum. Is there a clear set of steps I should follow to try to solve this problem? One possible clue: for a long time before these crashes/freezes started happening, I was seeing keyboard lag problems -- sometimes a periodic lag of a second or two while I'm typing a message. Thanks! T ___ mailmate mailing list mailmate@lists.freron.com https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
Re: [MlMt] frequent crashes and freezes, + earlier keyboard lag
On 24 Mar 2016, at 3:07, Ted Byfield wrote: Sorry about the late response on this one. I've been seeing a rising tide of unexpected quits and freezes (as in, spinning rainbow pizzas of death). The first sign of this was unexpected quits that happened when I tried to edit replies in GPG-encrypted conversations, but since then the problems have become much more common -- roughly 1 out of 3 times I interact with Mailmate at all, including something as simple as pulling clicking on a menubar counter. From time immemorial the generic advice for fixing this kind of problem for any app(lication) was: reinstall it! But I use Mailmate to check several accounts, so I'd really like to keep the amount of work involved to a bare minimum. Is there a clear set of steps I should follow to try to solve this problem? One possible clue: for a long time before these crashes/freezes started happening, I was seeing keyboard lag problems -- sometimes a periodic lag of a second or two while I'm typing a message. This does sound like it could be OpenPGP related. Have you tried disabling it (in the Security preferences pane) to see if this changes the behavior of MailMate? I'll need more data to tell you more. When it hangs then you can run this Terminal command to create a log file (or use Activity Monitor): sample MailMate 5 -f ~/Desktop/sample_mailmate.txt Oh, I just took a look at some crash reports from you (I believe). They indicate a problem with a progress indicator. This makes me think that the problem is somehow related to the spinners in the mailbox list. Maybe that rings a bell? (Maybe some other suspicious behavior related to this.) You can send me the sample off list and then we'll take it from there. -- Benny ___ mailmate mailing list mailmate@lists.freron.com https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
Re: [MlMt] frequent crashes and freezes, + earlier keyboard lag
On 23 Mar 2016, at 22:07, Ted Byfield wrote: Hi -- I've been seeing a rising tide of unexpected quits and freezes (as in, spinning rainbow pizzas of death). The first sign of this was unexpected quits that happened when I tried to edit replies in GPG-encrypted conversations, but since then the problems have become much more common -- roughly 1 out of 3 times I interact with Mailmate at all, including something as simple as pulling clicking on a menubar counter. From time immemorial the generic advice for fixing this kind of problem for any app(lication) was: reinstall it! But I use Mailmate to check several accounts, so I'd really like to keep the amount of work involved to a bare minimum. Is there a clear set of steps I should follow to try to solve this problem? One possible clue: for a long time before these crashes/freezes started happening, I was seeing keyboard lag problems -- sometimes a periodic lag of a second or two while I'm typing a message. Yes I know it was last week & Benny responded & your issue may be fixed by now but I have a *generic* suggestion for a practice I've found useful to keep MM from getting laggy: Keep your source mailboxes clean & not too big. Because MM is so focused on "Smart Mailboxes" and de-emphasizes the on-server IMAP folder structure, it is easy to get into a situation where you've got thousands of messages in a source mailbox (maybe INBOX, Trash, a singular Archive mailbox, or maybe others as well) and as a result also have thousands of message files in a single directory on your local disk in the tree under ~Library/Application Support/MailMate/Messages/. This is not as big of a problem as it would have been in years past because Apple has made advances in handling large directories over the years and we often have humongous filesystem caches in memory making recently-used stuff really fast, but this isn't just about your Mac. MM does work in the background keeping its cache in synch with your IMAP server and while your Mac may have the full metadata for the 50,000 messages in your Trash in the filesystem cache because you keep trashing messages and never empty it, your IMAP server has dozens of people doing the same thing and it dumped your info out of the cache 5 minutes ago when Joe Smith needed to scan his 100k-message Archive folder on the same server. So remember to empty your Trash. Delete mail from publicly-archived lists like this one periodically. For old stuff you want to have archived but don't need instant access to, use the Export command and delete it from the server. I don't know exactly how badly Apple's HFS+ performance declines as files/directory rises these days, but it is inherently worse than linear. I try to keep my folders below 2k messages and that seems to help prevent excessive beachballing. ___ mailmate mailing list mailmate@lists.freron.com https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
Re: [MlMt] frequent crashes and freezes, + earlier keyboard lag
2016-04-02 kl 23:33 skrev Bill Cole: > Keep your source mailboxes clean & not too big. Good advice. Thanks! -- Thomas ___ mailmate mailing list mailmate@lists.freron.com https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
Re: [MlMt] frequent crashes and freezes, + earlier keyboard lag
On 2 Apr 2016, at 23:33, Bill Cole wrote: Yes I know it was last week & Benny responded & your issue may be fixed by now but I have a *generic* suggestion for a practice I've found useful to keep MM from getting laggy: Keep your source mailboxes clean & not too big. Because MM is so focused on "Smart Mailboxes" and de-emphasizes the on-server IMAP folder structure, it is easy to get into a situation where you've got thousands of messages in a source mailbox (maybe INBOX, Trash, a singular Archive mailbox, or maybe others as well) and as a result also have thousands of message files in a single directory on your local disk in the tree under ~Library/Application Support/MailMate/Messages/. Guilty as charged, though I don't have nearly as many messages as some folks here (and I do clear out Trash on a regular basis). This is not as big of a problem as it would have been in years past because Apple has made advances in handling large directories over the years and we often have humongous filesystem caches in memory making recently-used stuff really fast, but this isn't just about your Mac. MM does work in the background keeping its cache in synch with your IMAP server and while your Mac may have the full metadata for the 50,000 messages in your Trash in the filesystem cache because you keep trashing messages and never empty it, your IMAP server has dozens of people doing the same thing and it dumped your info out of the cache 5 minutes ago when Joe Smith needed to scan his 100k-message Archive folder on the same server. So remember to empty your Trash. Delete mail from publicly-archived lists like this one periodically. For old stuff you want to have archived but don't need instant access to, use the Export command and delete it from the server. I don't know exactly how badly Apple's HFS+ performance declines as files/directory rises these days, but it is inherently worse than linear. I try to keep my folders below 2k messages and that seems to help prevent excessive beachballing. FWIW I've been experimenting with archiving newsgroup posts (as .eml files) in EagleFiler and on this Mac mini things started getting slow and beachballing at something like 100,000 posts. One simple answer there is to split them into separate EagleFiler libraries, e.g. work related groups / general interest groups. Alternatively splitting it into folders by year might help at the OS X file system level. Another answer of course is to get a more powerful Mac, preferably with SSDs ;.) ___ mailmate mailing list mailmate@lists.freron.com https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
Re: [MlMt] frequent crashes and freezes, + earlier keyboard lag
> On Apr 3, 2016, at 5:31 AM, Paul Sture wrote: > > FWIW I've been experimenting with archiving newsgroup posts (as .eml files) > in EagleFiler and on this Mac mini things started getting slow and > beachballing at something like 100,000 posts. One simple answer there is to > split them into separate EagleFiler libraries, e.g. work related groups / > general interest groups. Alternatively splitting it into folders by year > might help at the OS X file system level. In EagleFiler it's best to merge the .eml files into mailbox files so that you have one file per group/folder rather than one per post: http://c-command.com/eaglefiler/help/merge-mailboxes-message Aside from helping with the filesystem issue, this also lets EagleFiler apply various RAM and index optimizations. --Michael ___ mailmate mailing list mailmate@lists.freron.com https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate