Extremely slow response using 4.6.9 with server

[rt789ksde8]

I don't know if this is so much a question or a comment, but I recently upgraded to 4.6.9 on my windows 7 machine (which is an iMac running windows 7 in bootcamp). I've been running PM for years now accessing files (raws+jpegs) on a Synology server (CS407e). This isn't the fastest server on the planet, but response to general use such as cataloging, sorting, rating, renaming, rotating, etc. has generally been reasonable. Until 4.6.9, that is.

With this build, Photomechanic hangs for minutes on trying to access directories holding 100-300 photos, and it seems incapable of making simple metadata changes, such as applying a new star rating. Try that, and you get the spinning icon, maybe the gray screen, and after it hangs for a few minutes, I'm usually forced to quit.

I don't have any such issues accessing the same volume with, say, Lightroom, which I have set to write metada changes into files. Changing metadata via windows explorer is also much faster on an individual file level.

Obviously, PM has batch processing tools and an interface that makes this work a lot easier and faster -- so long as disk access is reasonable, but for some reason, it's bad enough to be unusable at this time.

Has anything changed in the recent 4.xxx builds that could explain this? I feel like I might need to roll back or simply stop using PM, because for the past month I've been wasting a ton of time with force kills and unending, gray-screen hangs.

[Kirk Baker]

I don't know if this is so much a question or a comment, but I recently upgraded to 4.6.9 on my windows 7 machine (which is an iMac running windows 7 in bootcamp). I've been running PM for years now accessing files (raws+jpegs) on a Synology server (CS407e). This isn't the fastest server on the planet, but response to general use such as cataloging, sorting, rating, renaming, rotating, etc. has generally been reasonable. Until 4.6.9, that is.

With this build, Photomechanic hangs for minutes on trying to access directories holding 100-300 photos, and it seems incapable of making simple metadata changes, such as applying a new star rating. Try that, and you get the spinning icon, maybe the gray screen, and after it hangs for a few minutes, I'm usually forced to quit.

I don't have any such issues accessing the same volume with, say, Lightroom, which I have set to write metada changes into files. Changing metadata via windows explorer is also much faster on an individual file level.

Obviously, PM has batch processing tools and an interface that makes this work a lot easier and faster -- so long as disk access is reasonable, but for some reason, it's bad enough to be unusable at this time.

Has anything changed in the recent 4.xxx builds that could explain this? I feel like I might need to roll back or simply stop using PM, because for the past month I've been wasting a ton of time with force kills and unending, gray-screen hangs.

If you work on files local to your computer, do the problems still occur?
If you browse photos on the server without updating them, does it browse quickly?

Can you see if any messages are being printed in your PM.log file?  It's in the same location as your Photo Mechanic Disk Cache.  You can view the path by going into the Caching tab of the Photo Mechanic Preferences dialog.

-Kirk

[rt789ksde8]

doing things locally is much faster. I usually do try to do most of the editing/rating locally before pushing things out to the server. But I still need to do some work once the files are there.

Browsing also seems slower, but it's faster than when I try to update a star rating and move to the next file. That can take a minute nowadays.

I did a side-by-side test running the prior version of PM on my laptop (an older, windows vista machine with less ram and a much slower processor) and accessing the same directory on the server (both are hardwired ethernet), it had faster performance, or seemed to.

I'm trying to check the log file, opening PM to check where that's being put, and PM is hanging just on starting up. I've had the swirling cursor for a minute now...

I may have to just uninstall here.

[Kirk Baker]

doing things locally is much faster. I usually do try to do most of the editing/rating locally before pushing things out to the server. But I still need to do some work once the files are there.

Browsing also seems slower, but it's faster than when I try to update a star rating and move to the next file. That can take a minute nowadays.

I did a side-by-side test running the prior version of PM on my laptop (an older, windows vista machine with less ram and a much slower processor) and accessing the same directory on the server (both are hardwired ethernet), it had faster performance, or seemed to.

I'm trying to check the log file, opening PM to check where that's being put, and PM is hanging just on starting up. I've had the swirling cursor for a minute now...

I may have to just uninstall here.

OK.  I'm sorry you're having difficulties with your file server.  My suggestion at this point would be to call our support folks during business hours and they'll help you troubleshoot the problem interactively.  This medium is poor for issue troubleshooting because of the delays in turnaround.

Their number is: (503) 547-2888

-Kirk

[rt789ksde8]

I'll try the call after I try a few more things. I did an uninstall/reinstall back to 4.6.8. I was still getting some enormous lag on startup. Five minutes or more. When it finally cleared, I changed the cache settings to store less data and get rid of it more frequently (thinking maybe I had some junk in there). That didn't seem to help much. Then I noticed that I get extremely slow reponse in the navigator window to the server directories (they're in there as mapped drives). Every time anything happens that requires a refresh of the directory tree in there, like startup, it takes about 1-2 seconds per directory from that sever, just to show the subdirectories. I finally got that whole tree collapsed and response, in general, snapped back. I don't know if I've got decent response to metadata updates on individual photos on the server yet, but I'll test that in a bit.

So for now, it appears one big issue is extreme lagginess from PM in building the directory tree in the navigator window. For what its worth, my other computers and my xbox and even a networked Samsung TV in my basement create full directory trees from this same box with very little lag.

[rt789ksde8]

A bit more searching and it looks like much of my issue might be a duplicate of this one.

http://forums.camerabits.com/index.php?topic=6717.msg31137#msg31137

[rt789ksde8]

It appears that much of the problem I was having with extremely slow response has been solved by closing the navigator pane. (I rolled back to 4.6.8, so I can't say all of the improvement is closing that pane.)

When I am in the preview window, hitting Alt+number to put star ratings on RAW+jpg photo stacks (photos on my NAS server), I now get a star assignment and jump to the next photo in 2-5 seconds, versus 30 or so before.