Linux is slow using calibre

[koneill]

I'm using Calibre on two computers, both recently updated from beleagured Windows to the freedom of Linux Mint. One is a 12 year old Dell, 32 bit, 1.8 GHz processor, 3 gigs of memory, Mint 17.30. Can't believe how revitalized that computer became. No problems with Calibre.

Second machine is a six year old ZT systems, 64 bit processor in the 3+ Ghz speed range, 16 gigs of memory. After maybe a dozen Edit Metadata, it slows to a snail's pace for saving updates. I mean real slow. I suspect we have a Linux problem. After an hour of metadata edits last evening, reboot took just short of five full minutes, whereas normal is around 20 seconds.

I'm learning Linux (at 75!), loving the discovery proocess. What fine tuning do you suspect will remedy this annoyance. Calibre currently has about 1,985 entries maintained on both computers.

[theducks]

I suspect a hardware problem. Sick disk (get the SMART status, IIRC it is available via Gparted). or you have a lint/fan issue or bulging caps

Mint 19 from a DVD does not take 5 Min to boot. I made a bootable (Minty Green ) pen drive to boot even faster than DVD.

[BetterRed]

Moderator Notice

Original post moved from the end of a SIX year old thread

Please don't post in ancient threads - calibre issues get fixed, and new features and improvements are added continuously

BR

[Adoby]

You could try moving the temp folder to RAM. See if that helps.

Also a HDD that is becoming full sometimes slows down. A lot. Make sure you have 20%-30% free storage left on the drive for it to work at full speed.

Here is an old post about tempfs. Only use it if you feel you have RAM enough. Test other software and revert if it slows down other things or doesn't help with calibre. Since I got a fast SSD I made sure tmp and swap was on it, along with ~/.cache

Originally Posted by Adoby

One way to significantly speed up many (some?) functions in Calibre is to put the temp folder on RAM, if you have plenty of memory in your computer.

In Linux (I use Ubuntu) this is easy by using tempfs. To do this I added this line to the file /etc/fstab

tmpfs /tmp tmpfs nodev,nosuid 0 0

This will use up to half of the available RAM and if needed also the swap partitions for the folder /tmp. As before, other unused memory will be used as disc cache. To have /tmp on tempfs may also good if you have a SSD, since it will reduce the number of writes to the SSD, increasing both performance and lifetime of the SSD.

Google /tmp fstab tmpfs for more info. Add the name of your Linux flavor.

This may also significantly speed up other programs that use /tmp a lot.

I believe something similar can be done in Windows? Then you can still take advantage of your 64 bit OS and extra memory, while running 32 bit Calibre.