Calibre is sometimes fast, sometimes veeeeery slow

[ficbot]

Wondering if something is up with the settings or something, but I am at my wit's end here. Sometimes Calibre zips along and everything is going smoothly. Other times, it is so slow that I can wait 15 minutes for one book to transfer. I started Calibre today after doing a weekly run with Onyx and it was speedy. I planned to leave it open and never quit. I was home sick today so I got a ton of stuff done. Then I was trying to close another window and quit by accident. I was devastated. When I opened it back up again, it was back to spending nearly ten minutes to convert a simple epub to a simple mobi, and now I am sitting there checking email while I wait for it to transfer two books to the Kindle. It really should not take this long, should it? Especially the file transfers, they didn't used to take this long. I only have 800 books. I just don't know what's going on because sometimes it does work normally. What I want to know is what's different in those cases so that I can replicate it I would have gone to bed twenty minutes ago if it was taking a more reasonable length of time to get things going. I am just trying to transfer a few books to the Kindle and I feel like it's going to take me all night.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by ficbot

Wondering if something is up with the settings or something, but I am at my wit's end here. Sometimes Calibre zips along and everything is going smoothly. Other times, it is so slow that I can wait 15 minutes for one book to transfer. I started Calibre today after doing a weekly run with Onyx and it was speedy. I planned to leave it open and never quit. I was home sick today so I got a ton of stuff done. Then I was trying to close another window and quit by accident. I was devastated. When I opened it back up again, it was back to spending nearly ten minutes to convert a simple epub to a simple mobi, and now I am sitting there checking email while I wait for it to transfer two books to the Kindle. It really should not take this long, should it? Especially the file transfers, they didn't used to take this long. I only have 800 books. I just don't know what's going on because sometimes it does work normally. What I want to know is what's different in those cases so that I can replicate it I would have gone to bed twenty minutes ago if it was taking a more reasonable length of time to get things going. I am just trying to transfer a few books to the Kindle and I feel like it's going to take me all night.

Look at Anti-virus settings. You can probably safely exclude your library .
Unfortunately, Calibre has files it frequently accesses in places where total exclusion is not a great idea.
The other thing to look at is CPU load and see which processes are grabbing the most
(That's where I saw my A/V using more than Calibre during conversion)

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by theducks

Look at Anti-virus settings. You can probably safely exclude your library .
Unfortunately, Calibre has files it frequently accesses in places where total exclusion is not a great idea.
The other thing to look at is CPU load and see which processes are grabbing the most
(That's where I saw my A/V using more than Calibre during conversion)

Good advice, the problem has to be on his system.

Anti-virus and anti-spyware programs are a good place to start. Multiple programs stepping on each other at the same time like 2 AV programs or other gatekeeper type programs.

I'm guessing he is using OS X, I don't have any experience with this system.

[ficbot]

Yes, Mac OS X. Does it have 'anti-virus settings' on it even? Fwiw last night, I quit Calibre and re-loaded it and then it let me put my books on the Kindle. So clearly, it is capable of brisk operation. I just wish I could isolate what the problem was.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by dwanthny

I'm guessing he is using OS X,

I will bite.
How did you know the O/P was not using Windows?

[kovidgoyal]

Definitely sounds like something on your system interferes. One way to look for clues is to open Console.app and see if there is any output there when running calibre and it being slow.

Also a quick restart of calibre might help.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by theducks

I will bite.
How did you know the O/P was not using Windows?

I googled Onyx and it is a Mac - OS X maintenance & optimization tool.

[nikkie]

My experience with calibre on my macbook was that it was very very very slow. While it did improve with successive versions, I prefer to use it on my desktop because I was happier with it on at least a 1280x1024 screen and spiffier processor.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by dwanthny

I googled Onyx and it is a Mac - OS X maintenance & optimization tool.

Thanks. Never thought to G a non-related program

[ficbot]

Thanks for the tip about Console, Kovid. I seem to have a lot of messages in there about .apple (I don't have an account there or use their web stuff so I am not sure why) and some sort of sourceforge.net app I don't recognize.

Here is the output from my book conversion today, a simple epub conversion begun at 11:15 and finished at 11:20. Forefox was open in the background but I wasn't using it or clicking on any links in it. I'll try running another conversion with Firefox closed and see if that helps.

4/28/10 11:15:42 PM com.apple.launchd[120] (0x10bf90.Locum[8421]) Exited: Terminated
4/28/10 11:16:01 PM [0x0-0xb5db5d].net.kovidgoyal.calibre[8152] link hasn't been detected!
4/28/10 11:16:01 PM [0x0-0xb5db5d].net.kovidgoyal.calibre[8152] link hasn't been detected!
4/28/10 11:16:01 PM [0x0-0xb5db5d].net.kovidgoyal.calibre[8152] link hasn't been detected!
4/28/10 11:16:01 PM [0x0-0xb5db5d].net.kovidgoyal.calibre[8152] link hasn't been detected!
4/28/10 11:16:01 PM [0x0-0xb5db5d].net.kovidgoyal.calibre[8152] link hasn't been detected!
4/28/10 11:16:01 PM [0x0-0xb5db5d].net.kovidgoyal.calibre[8152] link hasn't been detected!
4/28/10 11:16:01 PM [0x0-0xb5db5d].net.kovidgoyal.calibre[8152] link hasn't been detected!
4/28/10 11:16:01 PM [0x0-0xb5db5d].net.kovidgoyal.calibre[8152] link hasn't been detected!

ETA: Tried it again after closing Firefox and restarting Calibre. Same slowness, and same 'link hasn't been detected' output in Console.

[kovidgoyal]

Nothing useful there. The link hasn't been detected message is harmless and can be ignored.

Is there any book you have that is sometimes slow to convert and sometimes fast?

[ficbot]

I generally only convert it the one time. Is there another process-monitoring program I can use that might say what is going on?

[speakingtohe]

Rebooting always fixes this for me.
Or stopping calibre processes in task manager after I close the program. Usually they are stopped but sometimes they aren't

[kovidgoyal]

I'm sure OS X has a process monitoring program, though not being an OS X user, I can't really say what it is.

[Xenophon]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

I'm sure OS X has a process monitoring program, though not being an OS X user, I can't really say what it is.

It's the "Activity Monitor" program, found in the Utilities folder. It gives all the information you'd expect to get from the good-old-command-line program top, plus a bit more.

Xenophon