Calibre locks entire machine for 1-2 mins on first startup

[cybmole]

Originally Posted by JeanPaulo

.


Just for the fun, in Win 7, if you do have a disc larger than 2 Tb, Win backup can backup your system on it, but is TOTALY incapable of reading it back ! Nice bug, no ?

that is a motherboard / BIOS limitation for some PCs which don't support GUID. It does not apply to every single win 7 install . Millions of >2TB drives are sold every year, many of those must be to Win 7 users.

see here for GUID details

http://carltonbale.com/how-to-break-...-system-limit/

Windows XP 64-bit, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, or later: All of these operating systems support GUID Partition Table (GPT), which is a newer drive formatting process required to access beyond 2TB of drive space.

anyway, I could be wrong but I don't think anyone here has >2TB of books

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by chaley

Kovid's question is a good one: do you have any mapped network drives? If so, are they to resources that are not on line?

Do you have any "drive-like" devices plugged in?

Do you have any real-time backup program running?

Just a reminder - I don't have slow start times

mapped network drives: - yes, and they are not always on line - their availability has no effect on calibre start times - there are no libraries there that calibre knows about (offline backups)

"drive-like" devices: - yes, USB 2 and 3 drives, sometimes on sometimes not, again their availability has no effect on calibre start times. Before I got the USB3 disk dock I had a couple of esata drives connected - their availability also had no effect on calibre start times.

real-time backup: - no

Originally Posted by chaley

Commenting out that line leaves the MTP and wireless drivers running. Although the wireless driver is probably harmless (but who knows), the MTP driver must do some kind of bus scan.

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Then just make unmanaged_devices an empty list in gui2/device.py in addition to that change.

@chaley, kovid - this line of thought seems not to reached any conclusion

Originally Posted by JeanPaulo

Very tired of this

@JeanPaulo - I think I speak for more than just myself in saying your efforts in helping solve this problem are much appreciated.

BR

[chaley]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

@chaley, kovid - this line of thought seems not to reached any conclusion

Au contraire -- it establishes what to change/comment out if someone running from source is having the problem and wants to check if the scanner is causing the problem. Yes, I know that this combination would be unusual.

And FWIW: I had a startup freese problem until I whitelisted the calibre2 folder in MSE. Of course I was doing other things at the same time such as updating drivers (I had just rebuilt my machine) so I cannot say with certainty that the MS£ change is what made my problem go away.

[Katsunami]

Could it be that there is something wrong with the hard disk drivers, or settings in the BIOS, causing the hard drive to be forced to run in IDE mode, SATA-compatible mode (or even PIO... is that still possible on newer computers, anyway?) instead of AHCI? (On some old mainboards, the faster mode for HDD transfers can also be called DMA-mode.)

Especially when running in PIO mode, the hard disk will be dreadfully slow, and the CPU will be greatly bogged down.

It might be worth it to check these settings, and (re)install the mainboard's drivers.

I could be very wrong here, suggesting to check stuff out that maybe isn't relevant anymore for years already... I'm a bit out of the current, mainstream hardware loop (my rig is 7 years old in a few weeks), and I've actually forgotten most hardware things dating before 2007 or so.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by chaley

Au contraire -- it establishes what to change/comment out if someone running from source is having the problem and wants to check if the scanner is causing the problem. Yes, I know that this combination would be unusual.

@chaley - sorry - I read Kovid's post as a suggestion to you - so I was anticipating a response.

Originally Posted by chaley

And FWIW: I had a startup freese problem until I whitelisted the calibre2 folder in MSE. Of course I was doing other things at the same time such as updating drivers (I had just rebuilt my machine) so I cannot say with certainty that the MS£ change is what made my problem go away.

If you 'disable the device scan' and remove the exclusion of calibre2 in MSE does the 'problem' go away ?

I think we have two issues - one which appears to be MSE related as you've experienced, and another which is not. HarryT's almost certainly isn't MSE related because he had the same 'slowness' after uninstalling MSE.

Have you tried uninstalling MSE? Unlike other AV's its easy to uninstall and reinstall. You do have to ignore the MS Governess Or tried another AV?

@Katsunami - but why would the sort of thing you've suggested only effect calibre, and not similar applications like music, video, and photo managers, or IDE's like Visual Studio, Eclipse etc. I'm sure some people would have one or more of those running off the same drives

BR

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by cybmole

I think this is grasping at straws. defragging the registry in windows 7 might shave 2 milliseconds off of boot time. even microsoft say don't bother & don't waste your money on registry cleaners. the registry is loaded once, at boot & held in ram unless you are desperately short of that, so registry access during normal use shoudl be immediate, no matter how fragged the file copy is.

a page file in need of defrag could maybe slow a machine by a fraction of a second but not freeze it for a long time.

and either of those would impact all programs not solely calibre

a failing hard drive could cause a lengthy freeze, but we have multiple posters with the same issues, it is unlikely they all have failing drives ?

but this does prompt another thought, what if the affected users were to install & test launch calibre portable - would that freeze in the same manner as the regular install, or not ?

to all of the above

I think the portable suggestion has been made earlier - hopefully someone will try it.

The other thing to try (if possible) would be the other installable version (32 if you have 64, 64 if you have 32 and you have enough memory). IIRC this solved a couple of other 'strange' problems in the past. It's suggested as a possible remedy in User Manual - calibre freezes/crashes occasionally?

BR

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by JeanPaulo

Out of spite, I decided to try what has been requested several time.

After 6 tries, I finally got the 'Safe mode wit network' message on boot, and started it.

Boots very quickly...

I just launched 'task manager' and the Calibre (nothing else).

Well ! As usual, on first start, I count slowly to 55. Everything frozen, including all of the Task' screen and its clock... When the splash screen shows (at last), it stays for 3 seconds and then the program run immediately.

Closed it, restarted, almost instananeous.

And answer to the 'quote above':

No, not any 'Network drive'
No device running other than the permanent USB disk (forget to check
if it was available, then)

No back-up program running (I do it by hand myself)

Mystery stay entirely (Gremlins, may be ?)

And I do not have any library or scan by Calibre, just an empty lib
that I use to convert files then delete it. Don't even have the 'help book'
in there

The fact that Calibre started fast the second time and ran slow the first time could be because of a seriously fragmented hard drive. The second run ran faster because of things cached in memory that were not the first time and Calibre had to be loaded fully from disk.

Try defragmenting your system drive and whatever drive the Calibre library is on and see how fast it runs.

[eschwartz]

Once again -- any solution needs to account for calibre being unusual in starting slowly.

[cybmole]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The fact that Calibre started fast the second time and ran slow the first time could be because of a seriously fragmented hard drive. The second run ran faster because of things cached in memory that were not the first time and Calibre had to be loaded fully from disk.

Try defragmenting your system drive and whatever drive the Calibre library is on and see how fast it runs.

kovid says that 1st run speed is because of need to load DLLs into memory,
a badly fragmented drive will cause a tiny amount of slowdown ( nowhere near as much as the vendors of expensive defrag programs would have you believe) but it would have almost no effect on loading calibre program only with an empty library ( which has been tried). that's a disk read of what, 50MB total ?

there's a big difference between a PC seeming a tad sluggish , for which you would work through -> defrag everything , kill unnecessary start up services , sweep for malware, re-install OS-> -> give up & buy a better one
and having the whole thing lock up for up to a minute, including task manager, especially if that were still the case after all of the above!

Originally Posted by BetterRed

to all of the above

I think the portable suggestion has been made earlier - hopefully someone will try it.

The other thing to try (if possible) would be the other installable version (32 if you have 64, 64 if you have 32 and you have enough memory). IIRC this solved a couple of other 'strange' problems in the past. It's suggested as a possible remedy in User Manual - calibre freezes/crashes occasionally?

BR

OK. Out of nerves (I already tested both 32 and 64 bits), I got the Portable version.

Reboot, wait for activity to stop.

Starts 'Ressource monitor'

When there is NO DISC ACTIVITY at all, and very little processor, I started
Calibre-Portable.

After 2 or 3 seconds, even the RESSOURCE MONITOR freezed until I counted to 50, and then calibre started.

Just to be sure, i restarted it with ressource monitor active. On this second start, no freeze, very little disc activity and no freeze.

So there is something, done only on first start after reboot, that freeze Windows. Activity during the freeze was NOT recorded, everything was
really dead.

[eschwartz]

@cybmole

#include post113.h

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

@Katsunami - but why would the sort of thing you've suggested only effect calibre, and not similar applications like music, video, and photo managers, or IDE's like Visual Studio, Eclipse etc. I'm sure some people would have one or more of those running off the same drives

Not very long ago, I had an issue on a computer at work. It would work without problems, except when downloading large amounts of small files from an FTP-server. When doing that, the entire computer would eventually freeze, though it would still download files in the background, until the entire download was done. Updating the network card driver fixed this problem.

Calibre loads a very large amount of small files when starting, so I thought it might be a similar issue.

I've also seen the idea to install Calibre Portable, which is completely independent from the current main Calibre installation. Has this been tried already?

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

I've also seen the idea to install Calibre Portable, which is completely independent from the current main Calibre installation. Has this been tried already?

Look at post #115.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by JeanPaulo

OK. Out of nerves (I already tested both 32 and 64 bits), I got the Portable version.

Reboot, wait for activity to stop.

Starts 'Ressource monitor'

When there is NO DISC ACTIVITY at all, and very little processor, I started
Calibre-Portable.

After 2 or 3 seconds, even the RESSOURCE MONITOR freezed until I counted to 50, and then calibre started.

Just to be sure, i restarted it with ressource monitor active. On this second start, no freeze, very little disc activity and no freeze.

So there is something, done only on first start after reboot, that freeze Windows. Activity during the freeze was NOT recorded, everything was
really dead.

@JeanPaulo - - I think that clears up those loose (dead) ends

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The only new suggestion I have is to 'devise a process' to compare detailed system specs from computers that have the problem with same info from computers that don't have the problem, using something like Speccy.

Not sure that we should do that in an open forum - any thoughts?

BR

[DrChiper]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

@[B]The only new suggestion I have is to 'devise a process' to compare detailed system specs from computers that have the problem with same info from computers that don't have the problem, using something like Speccy.

It is even complexer: there are also computers which sometimes have the problem, like mine does.