Suddently Search Unusably Slow, Cannot Delete Tag
 

I recently upgraded my OS (Fedora 33). Now, I cannot use calibre because all searches are too slow. It doesn't matter what or where I search. The main Search field and the tag search are both too slow; it takes 30 seconds per character. It's unusable.

In trying to fix this, I also managed to delete the tag group from the left-side pane, which lists authors, languages, series, formats, etc. I don't know how to add the tags group back. This is not a major problem, but I would like to get it back, of course.

When I try to search anything, the "Worker" process spikes to 100 % CPU usage.

My suspicion is that there is a bad tag. When I go to the tag manager, I see there is one tag at the very top that has special characters in it. But, when I try to "recycle" this tag, the whole application crashes. I can delete other tags this way, though, so I'm pretty sure I should get rid of that tag, even if it is not the root cause.

I have a pretty large library of 4300+ books.

Any ideas? How do I delete this one tag? Do you think this slowness could be cause by one bad tag?

Switch to a new library to check if the slowness is caused by your existing library. And since you are on linux make sure you are using the official calibre binaries not the distro calibre package.

Okay, so I've located the entry with that strange tag, and anything I do to try to interact with it, hangs Calibre. I even deleted the directories & files in the library, but the entry is still there. How do I fix this?

Thanks!

I created a new, empty library, and that doesn't show any slowness, but it doesn't have any books in it, so, I'm not sure what to make of that.

Okay, i added a hand full of PDFs I had laying around and still no slowness. Searching is supper spiffy fast.

I am using the distro package. But, I was using the official release and had some problems with it, so I switched back to the distro. I could try it again, but there's no way to install it "locally", which is a problem for me. So that made using the installer a lot of trouble.

Okay, I installed the official 5.10 version from your server and it behaves the same way. But, now my database is upgraded to version 24, so I'm guessing I cannot go back.

Yay! The new version allowed me to delete the offending tag and now all the searching is spiffy fast again!

Thank you!

So, it was one offending tag. And, the tag editor was more robust and let me delete it without crashing. The offending tag was huge, very long, with '%' chars all over, like a URL.

I think my install of your official version is working. I'll keep that, for now.

Also, got my tag category back in the left pane: right-click...

you most definitely can install the official version locally, the instructions to do so are on the download page.

What I meant was that it cannot be completed in user space. All install procedures require root privileges at some point. That's the part that I don't like. I prefer the distro pkg for that reason. I don't mind placing files in /opt, but i don't want to run any code/scripts as root.

It's okay, I think I have a functional install, without running the post install script.

Thanks for your help!

BTW, I did not add this offending tag. It must have been part of the PDF when I imported it. FYI.

No, the installer does not require root if you run it in isolated mode.

Hmm, I have read the installation instruction three times now and never got to the "isolated installation" version of the instructions. I had to search the page to find it. There are seven different installation command sets on that page, and six of them explicitely require root privileges. Thanks for telling me about this option. I'll try it.