[Old Thread] Calibre not responding

[JMikeD]

I had occasional problems with Calibre locking up when I clicked on a book name to select it with 0.6.34, but with 0.6.35 and 0.6.36 it happens every single time. I click and get the spinning ball and it just never comes back, I have to force quit. The CPU usage meter jumps up to 98-100%.

I can re-install 0.6.34 and the problem almost goes away entirely

I'm using Mac OS 10.6. Anybody have any ideas on what's causing this?

[kovidgoyal]

Do you get any output in Console.app when this happens?

[JMikeD]

Oddly enough, for the moment the problem seems to have disappeared. I was doing some reorganizing of my library ( with 0.6.34) and deleted some duplicates and have not had the problem reoccur, even with 0.6.36. I had something like 5700+ items in the Calibre database (many short stories).

I went back to the console.app before I did this, and didn't see anything leap out at me.

[JMikeD]

It started happening again today. I clicked on a book title to select it, and Calibre stopped responding. Console.app says "link hasn’t been detected" on two consecutive lines.

[kovidgoyal]

Hmm not enough information for me to make a diagnosis. Are there any particular actions that always trigger the freeze?

[JMikeD]

Just clicking on any book title to select it. Instant lockup with spinning ball. Activity monitor shows Calibre take up most of the CPU time.

The "link not detected" messsage occurs when Calibre is launched, not when book titles are clicked. It doesn’t seem like that particular message is associated with the problem.

Searches work fine, but trying to select an individual title does not.

Further testing indicates that the problem only occurs when all books are shown, i.e. doing a search and selecting a title on any volume in the subset found works fine. It sems to be only when all books are in the set that it locks up.

[kovidgoyal]

Is it a size issue. If you restrict to a subset that is only a little smaller than the full set, does it still happen?

Do you have the tag browser and or the cover browser open?

[JMikeD]

I did a search that eliminated three of the 5700+ entries, same behavior.

I don't have the cover or tag browser open.

I found that the arrow cursor will come back after 3-4 minutes, and I can then click on something else. It appears as though I have the functionality I used to have, but anytime I click on a title, the program just goes away for several minutes.

[kovidgoyal]

So, to be clear

With small sets of books showing there's no problem. With 5K+ it freezes each time you click a new title?

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by JMikeD

The "link not detected" messsage occurs when Calibre is launched, not when book titles are clicked. It doesn’t seem like that particular message is associated with the problem.

I doubt it's of any use, but FYI, I'm running Vista 32 and I see the 'link hasn't been detected!" message twice on startup and another ten times when entering the config screen. It seems to have no detrimental effect that I can see. My library is larger than 10K, and I do not have any lockup problems.

[kovidgoyal]

The link not detected message comes from rendering the SVG icons used in the calibre interface (they occasionally have empty links) and is completely harmless.

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

The link not detected message ... is completely harmless.

That's what I figured, but I thought I'd put the exact error message here, then if anyone searches on it they'll see that it's not the problem.

[JMikeD]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

So, to be clear

With small sets of books showing there's no problem. With 5K+ it freezes each time you click a new title?

I'm going to do more testing tomorrow, but that's what it appears to do now. It also happens when I click on one of the column headers to sort on that column.

[kovidgoyal]

When you click on a title in the library, calibre loads the cover, is there anything on your computer that could be slowing that down?

[JMikeD]

I'll need to some more testing, but it may be a conflict of some sort with Spell Catcher, my interactive spelling checker. I've turned it off for Calibre, and preliminary results were encouraging, but I need to do more testing.