PM becomes unresponsive after focus is on another application

[Joel Goodman]

Windows 7 64 bit
Photo Mechanic v 5.0 build 15451

Hi,

This has been bugging me for a while and it can really frustrate my workflow so any help is appreciated.

If I carry out an action which takes focus from the Photo Mechanic window - eg start editing a photo in external software or click in a browser window/whatever then, when I return focus to the Photomechanic window and attempt to continue my work in PM, the Photo Mechanic display window with jump a few pixels up and to the left and become non-responsive for a period of between a few seconds and up to several minutes.

If, during this non-responsive period, I attempt to click on anything within the Photo Mechanic window, the entire window becomes greyed out and I am given a Windows option to wait for it to become responsive or force it closed (as attached image).

If I wait it out, PM becomes responsive and, once it's working again, if I maintain use of Photo Mechanic without switching focus to another application, then this problem will not recur - until I switch focus to another application and then the problem recurs.

Thanks for any help.

[attachment deleted by admin]

[Hayo Baan]

Are your images on an internal, external, or network drive? When PM receives focus again it rescans the folders in the contact sheet for changes, this may be slow. Not sure this is really it (can't recall any one else reporting your issue), but it may be worth checking out.

[Joel Goodman]

They're on a NAS.

[Kirk Baker]

Joel,

I notice two things from your screen shots.  One is that you're using the Capture Time sort which is one of the slowest sort types that PM offers.  It is slow because the capture date information comes from parsing the data in the images rather than from file system data.  The second thing is that it is taking a long time to render your thumbnails (all of the thumbnails that are red are not fully rendered.)

How fast is your network and your NAS drive?

-Kirk

[Joel Goodman]

Hi Kirk,
The network is 1Gb (PC <-> switch <-> Synology DS413J NAS).
Any ideas?
Ta
Joel.

[Kirk Baker]

Joel,

The network is 1Gb (PC <-> switch <-> Synology DS413J NAS).

That should be reasonably fast.  How long do you have to be away from PM for the resume of PM to be unresponsive?  Is it possible that your NAS has spun down its drives due to inactivity?

-Kirk

[Joel Goodman]

Hi Kirk,
I haven't timed it but it's considerably less than the 20 minutes I've set for the NAS to enter HDD Hybernation so I don't believe that's the culprit.
Having said that, I've just upped it to 30 minutes.
Any other possibilities?

[Kirk Baker]

Hi Kirk,
I haven't timed it but it's considerably less than the 20 minutes I've set for the NAS to enter HDD Hybernation so I don't believe that's the culprit.
Having said that, I've just upped it to 30 minutes.
Any other possibilities?

Well, you could send me your PM log file and I can see if there are any obvious things going wrong.  Use the "Reveal Support Data..." command on the Help menu.  You can either post the zip file here, give me a private link, or I can give you an email address to send it to privately.

There are other logging flags we can turn on to force PM to tell how long it takes to rescan a folder and perform other operations.

-Kirk

[Joel Goodman]

Thanks Kirk,
I'm emailing the log to you at the forum email address you've advised I use previously.
I switched for a while to filename sort, but it's still slooooow.
Thanks,
Joel.