eNews - How to auto replace old files

[bthoven]

I used to use Mobipocket on Nokia. I think it is an excellent ebooks and enews reader. The desktop version to manage the ebooks/enews are also easy and effortless to use. Unfortunately, it seems no hope to use it on iPhone.

I usually subscribe for quite a number of full feeds and it automatically download the latest news, replacing the old ones and install into my phone without my intervention.

Calibre is the only option I have for iPhone to allow me to read offline news feed.

Using Calibre, I also subscribe to the same feeds; however:

1. it is much slower to fetch the feeds
2. it always create new files, instead of replacing. So I have to delete the old files manually
3. During fetching my scheduled news feeds, my PC is very slow to response. Most of the time, it comes to the point where I cannot do other tasks during the fetching.

How can I resolve the issue 2 and 3?

Thanks in advance.

[kovidgoyal]

2. There is an option at the bottom of the fetch news dialog that says

"Delete news older than x days" use it

3. In the Preferences set the process priority to Low

[itimpi]

Originally Posted by bthoven

3. During fetching my scheduled news feeds, my PC is very slow to response. Most of the time, it comes to the point where I cannot do other tasks during the fetching.

I have the priority for calibre background tasks set to Low in the Calibre preferences.

I also start Calibre itself via a batch file containing
START /BELOWNORMAL Calibre.exe

The combination of these two seem to keep the PC reasonably responsive when Calibre is running.

[bthoven]

Thanks for the tips

I try setting priority to low. The result was the same..it still drag my PC to almost halt.

A few months back, I never experienced this..I'm not sure it happened just with the newer version I installed?

Any further suggestion?

[itimpi]

Did you also use the tip for setting the main Calibre process to BelowNormal priority?

If not, you can test the effect by doing it manually using Task Manager.

[acidzebra]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

2. There is an option at the bottom of the fetch news dialog that says "Delete news older than x days" use it

I've set this to 1 day, and it faithfully deletes news from my library, but not from my reader?

Also, regarding CPU usage, I've noticed that on my work machine (windows) Calibre does tend to hog the CPU (the machine is a HP 2510p laptop which rather poor CPU cooling and fetching the BBC feed sometimes causes the CPU to overheat so badly the BIOS kicks in and shuts the thing down), this is not nearly as noticeable on my main linux box. I'll try setting the prefs on windows, see if that helps.

[bthoven]

Thanks a lot for all your tips.

My notebook is Pentium Dual Core 1.66ghz. I've never noticed about the overheat of CPU; now your experience really frighten me!

[acidzebra]

I wouldn't worry about it too much; as I've said the cooling on my HP is pretty poor.

Also, Itimpi's suggestion of running Calibre from a batch file with "START /BELOWNORMAL Calibre.exe" and Kovid's suggestion of setting the job priority to low has helped a lot.

[kovidgoyal]

Delete news doesn't delete from the reader. It wont until I implement syncing between library and reader. Right now calibre has no way to know which files on the reader were created by it and which not.

[bthoven]

Originally Posted by itimpi

Did you also use the tip for setting the main Calibre process to BelowNormal priority?

If not, you can test the effect by doing it manually using Task Manager.

I try setting priority of all processes (Calibre, Calibre-parallel) to low; but it does not help.

During fetching enews (6 enews), I see a lot of Calibre-parallel processes running. Some of it takes up so high memory, almost 1gb. I believe this is the main reason why it slow down my PC because it perform page-in/out all the time due to insufficient memory (I have 1.5gb).

Even I kill the Calibre process, all those Calibre-parallel processes are still running in the background. I have to kill them manually one by one before I can use my PC for other tasks.

Any reason why it took so high memory?

Thanks

[bthoven]

What I notice is the Calibre-parallel.exe memory usage is growing as we continue fetching the enews. Even when the fetching finished, the Calibre-parallel.exe process is still there and its memory usage remains that high.

I'm not sure why the memory usage of the process needs to grow and is still hanging there even it has completed the fetching.

[kovidgoyal]

what version of calibre are you using? Each calibre-parallel process dies after it completes its task.

[bthoven]

I use both the 0.6.5 and 0.5.14. It has the same issue but 0.5.14 still let me do other task without problem.

[kovidgoyal]

Upgrade to 0.6.7 there have been various fixes since 0.6.5

[JvdW]

Originally Posted by bthoven

What I notice is the Calibre-parallel.exe memory usage is growing as we continue fetching the enews. Even when the fetching finished, the Calibre-parallel.exe process is still there and its memory usage remains that high.

I'm not sure why the memory usage of the process needs to grow and is still hanging there even it has completed the fetching.

Goto www.sysinternals.com and download atleast Process Explorer, there are lots of goodies there, and run that. Browse through the menus and select a few extra columns to view (the ones from Process Memory are probably most interesting). Watch the memory usage when downloading news items.

I just did that and Calibre starts 4 calibre-parallel.exe processes (though that should be 2, 1 per cpu, this is a 1 cpu hyperthreaded P4). When news downloading is complete the parallel.exe responsible for the download dies and a new one is created to replace it. Keeping 4 of them available at all times.
Total memory usage doesn't seem alot to me, around 200Mb and thats on the high side.

Keep us posted of your findings,

Joop