Calibre "sleeps"

[Fbone]

Thanks everyone for your help.

I have 4GB RAM on Windows 7 laptop. Probably not enough I guess.

Adoby, I like the ReadyBoost idea. Will try it as soon as I buy a thumb drive. Mine currently is not acceptable according to Windows.

[ilovejedd]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Curious - how many of those would be running concurrently ?

BR

Firefox is always open with multiple tabs (either active or minimized). Sometimes, I'd have Chrome open, too, with its own set of tabs. Back when I had a platter drive, restoring just Firefox from minimize is enough to stall my computer. Could definitely hear the hard drive grinding. Even user input gets delayed. Dropbox also runs in the background as well as a couple other utilities. Then whatever other software I actively need at the moment (could be 2, could be 10 but heaviest footprint is still web browser).

The SSD really helps. A *lot*. While NAND flash is still an order of magnitude slower than RAM, it's a darned sight faster than HDD in terms of latency/random access. If you have a Core 2 Duo or newer CPU, chances are storage is a big bottleneck.

I remember back when I was still waiting for consumer 1TB SSDs to be available. My older 1.3GHz C2D SU7300 ultraportable (with 256GB SSD) was more responsive than my new-back-then 2.7GHz i7-2620M laptop. Granted, the SU7300 could barely handle brute force 1080p H.264 decode. Certainly had trouble with Hulu back in the days pre-HW acceleration.

[dwig]

Originally Posted by ilovejedd

That's exaggerating. I'm forced to use 32-bit Windows 7 due to equipment that doesn't have 64-bit drivers ergo, user-accessible RAM is just around 2.5GB or thereabouts. Iirc, it's got either quad-core Sandy or Ivy. With a Samsung 840 250GB, everything's quite zippy. Apart from number-crunching tasks, there's no noticeable difference in performance between that and faster builds with 16GB RAM.

Heck, I've got a couple of Celeron 1037U Mini-ITX builds with 2x1GB DDR3 and 128GB M.2 (SATA) SSD. These were basically built from leftover parts except for the motherboard with embedded CPU. They handle typical user tasks (web browsing, Facebook, Tumblr, Word, Excel, etc) including Calibre (iirc, library of ~3,000 epubs) just fine.

Agreed...

I run a wide range of machines. My two most frequently used Windows machines both run Win10. I also run an recent iMac 27" Retina). These range from the iMac (Sierra, i7, SSD, 32gb RAM, external HDs totalling 20tb, ...) & Dell XPS (i7, fast HD, 8gb RAM, external HDs totalling 16tb, ...) to a Dell Venue 8 Pro tablet (~1.5ghz quad-core, 32gb eMMC, 2gb RAM, 64gb microSD). They all run calibre perfectly well, even the tablet where calibre is installed on the secondary drive (microSD card) and there are some 1800 ebook titles and over 3000 actual ebook files.

Yes, the tablet it quite noticeably slower when converting or updated metadata, but its still quite serviceable. One the "big" machines, I generally have 2-3 large apps (Ps, Lr, Id, ...) and several smaller apps (email, browsers, ...) running all day. One the tablet I generally only run one app at a time, though occasionally run calibre, calibre's Editor, and a browser at the same time.

[Adoby]

Originally Posted by Fbone

Thanks everyone for your help.

I have 4GB RAM on Windows 7 laptop. Probably not enough I guess.

Adoby, I like the ReadyBoost idea. Will try it as soon as I buy a thumb drive. Mine currently is not acceptable according to Windows.

Please report back here if you get it to work.

[LadyKate]

Originally Posted by Fbone

Thanks everyone for your help.

I have 4GB RAM on Windows 7 laptop. Probably not enough I guess.

Adoby, I like the ReadyBoost idea. Will try it as soon as I buy a thumb drive. Mine currently is not acceptable according to Windows.

You give your ram and OS but what processor and speed is your system.
How have you configured your swap disk?

With just 4 gig of ram your system has to be doing a lot of swapping.

How many books are in your Calibre library and how much disk space does it occupy?

You may do better using an older version of Calibre. Just because it is older isn't a reason to discount it. The newer versions of Calibre use more resources. That makes sense. But the older versions are still supported or should I say forum supported. Find the most bulletproof version you can and "step back" to it. You will probably find it uses less resources.

[Fbone]

Originally Posted by LadyKate

You give your ram and OS but what processor and speed is your system.
How have you configured your swap disk?

With just 4 gig of ram your system has to be doing a lot of swapping.

How many books are in your Calibre library and how much disk space does it occupy?

You may do better using an older version of Calibre. Just because it is older isn't a reason to discount it. The newer versions of Calibre use more resources. That makes sense. But the older versions are still supported or should I say forum supported. Find the most bulletproof version you can and "step back" to it. You will probably find it uses less resources.

I'm using Calibre 3.6 with about 8000 books in 5 libraries.

My PC has an i3 at 2.53Mhz

I did add a 4GB USB for Readyboost.

Also did a virus and malware scan. Cleaned cache/temp. Uninstalled many unused programs. Registry cleaner. Finally did a defrag. I noticed startup is faster.

I'll see if performance improves.

[LadyKate]

Originally Posted by Fbone

I'm using Calibre 3.6 with about 8000 books in 5 libraries.

My PC has an i3 at 2.53Mhz

I did add a 4GB USB for Readyboost.

Also did a virus and malware scan. Cleaned cache/temp. Uninstalled many unused programs. Registry cleaner. Finally did a defrag. I noticed startup is faster.

I'll see if performance improves.

As I don't believe there are any viruses that hit epubs see if excluding file type epub from your virus scan speeds things up. What about the size of your disk cache for memory?? Even with 32 gig of ram I notice that if I'm multitasking too much or using too large of files I will notice the disk activity that signals disk swapping. Too small a swap file can cause problems or if the drive the swap file is on is slow it will also cause slowdowns.

[itimpi]

Originally Posted by LadyKate

As I don't believe there are any viruses that hit epubs see if excluding file type epub from your virus scan speeds things up.

I prefer to exclude the whole of a Calibre library folder as there are other files in there that are not ePub files.

[ilovejedd]

Originally Posted by LadyKate

As I don't believe there are any viruses that hit epubs see if excluding file type epub from your virus scan speeds things up. What about the size of your disk cache for memory?? Even with 32 gig of ram I notice that if I'm multitasking too much or using too large of files I will notice the disk activity that signals disk swapping. Too small a swap file can cause problems or if the drive the swap file is on is slow it will also cause slowdowns.

Too small of a swap file would typically manifest as out of memory crashes. If it's just slow, most likely to do with storage. I've sometimes had my system go completely unresponsive restoring Firefox from minimize back when I only had a single HDD for OS+swap.

[Fbone]

Originally Posted by LadyKate

As I don't believe there are any viruses that hit epubs see if excluding file type epub from your virus scan speeds things up. What about the size of your disk cache for memory?? Even with 32 gig of ram I notice that if I'm multitasking too much or using too large of files I will notice the disk activity that signals disk swapping. Too small a swap file can cause problems or if the drive the swap file is on is slow it will also cause slowdowns.

I don't keep an anti-virus running. Just a quick scan with Defender when needed.

However, I discovered problems with Chrome. It looks like my user profile was corrupted after a recent update. Unresponsive. Reinstalled but it wouldn't start in normal mode. Uninstalled Chrome and installed Firefox. While Firefox uses lots of memory (lots!), my system has been running smoothly.

Where do you find disk cache?

[Adoby]

Most OS dedicate a portion of RAM as disk cache. In addition otherwise unused RAM is used as disk cache. So to increase the disk cache you can reduce the number of programs taking up room running. Or add more RAM.

So "free memory" is a pretty good approximation of how large your disk cache is.

In Windows it is also possible to use fast flash memory as disk cache, with the Ready Boost feature.

Typically you only cache reads. It may improve performance significantly to also cache writes. Especially on a mechanical HDD. But if something bad™ happens before the write cache is flushed you may loose data or experience corrupt data on disk.

[Fbone]

My "free memory" according to WTM is 382MB. So far minimal slowdowns.