Calibre painfully slow on Sony PRS-T1

[bagby]

I

'm new to my Sony PRST1 and to Calibre. My problem is that Calibre operation has become wretchedly and intolerably slow. I have approx. 350 books on a 32GB SD card, but it takes forever (23 minutes so far, and counting) just to get a list of books on the device. Adding books takes over 4 hours.

I've been advised to start a new thread on the above. I've also been advised to post 'a copy of the log which can be found under the list of jobs.', but cannot for the life of me find any such log. A screenshot of the jobs list:



Job 1, "Get List of Books on Device", reached a progress level of 100% by 1 minute, and yet it continued to do something for 31m 19s before it finished. (The "Show Job Details" button just gives me a pop-up that says "No details available".)

After that half-hour wait, Calibre automatically started another job, "Send Metadata to device". Again, no details are available, so there's no hint of what is actually going on or what might be causing problems, but whatever this is, it typically goes on for many minutes (20 as I write this) or hours.

I have tried resetting the reader (soft reset). I've reformatted the SD card.
I selected most of my ebooks, told Calibre to send them to the device, and went to bed. Next morning Calibre still hadn't finished.

I have tried another SD card, but this made no difference. Rebooting the computer, reinstalling Calibre, likewise. I looked over the database with a SQLLITE browser, saw no obvious problems, was able to open and view the tables. I have switched USB ports. I have switched USB cables.

This time I copied the ebooks to the device's SD card manually, deleted the existing .db files, then started Calibre. It's not looking good.

If Calibre takes anything like 30 minutes to several hours to perform basic tasks, then it's just useless to me.

Most frustrating is the lack of information. Is Calibre having I/O problems? Trouble writing to the database? Is the database corrupt? (Might well be. Calibre refuses to let me delete a job, even one it hasn't started on yet, and when I shut it down it warns me that this might corrupt the device. Geeze! You'd think a "stop now" function is really basic, and a prompt, orderly shutdown without eating itself even more so.)

But there must be something wrong here. People wouldn't say this was a good application if it did this all the time. Does anyone have any idea what might be going wrong or what might help?

[itimpi]

What format are these books? If they are PDF lies then you can dramatically speed up the transfer time by disabling the PDF reader/writer plugins.

[bagby]

The vast majority of the files are ePubs, only about 1% are pdf's.

I changed out the SDHC card for a new 16GB Class 10 -- mostly because they were on sale -- and this made a dramatic difference. I had been using a 32GB Class 4. The other test card I used previously was an 8GB Class 4, fwiw. Now I would not expect either the size or the class to make much of a difference, unless perhaps the card itself was damaged.

(I have not heard of this failure mode, though. SDHC cards pretty much either work or don't, possibly corrupt data, but not slow everything down. The 32GB card works fine, and with more data on it, in my MP3 player and my phone.)


I speculate that the size of the memory card may be the issue, and that the reader itself has difficulty handling 32GB cards. They are relatively new on the market, so much so that Fry's still keeps them under lock and key, thus it's possible that this issue just hasn't had the opportunity to happen to very many people yet.

My problem appears to be resolved, but if y'all happen to have access to, or are going to get a 32GB Micro SDHC card, why not try it in your Sony Reader, and see if you have issues with it?

[theducks]

Originally Posted by bagby

I speculate that the size of the memory card may be the issue, and that the reader itself has difficulty handling 32GB cards. They are relatively new on the market, so much so that Fry's still keeps them under lock and key, thus it's possible that this issue just hasn't had the opportunity to happen to very many people yet.

My problem appears to be resolved, but if y'all happen to have access to, or are going to get a 32GB Micro SDHC card, why not try it in your Sony Reader, and see if you have issues with it?

Fry's products have Quality differences that vary wildly.
I use 'Patriot' 4G (class 6) SD cards in my PEz with over 3K of EPUB and 23M of Calibre housekeeping files. Only 1.4G used, and that includes 127M of MP3's.
BTW: It took hours to have Calibre make a backup card (in a SD Card reader which is faster than my PEz will run )

[bagby]

The 32GB card is a Patriot product.

Frys Electronics sells products from various manufacturers. Some of the manufacturers are really just re-labellers, obtaining product from different factories and putting their own brand names on them. Frys isn't responsible for that, and the product quality would vary no matter who sold them. Newegg is in exactly the same position and is selling the same products from the same vendors.

Unwilling to leave matters there, I used the Sony to reformat the 32GB card, but happened to look at it in Windows a little later, and saw epub files still present on it. (!)

I then had Windows do a full (as opposed to quick) format on the card, which took quite a while, but it then agreed that there was nothing on the card.

Then the reader would not recognize the card. I reformatted the card on the reader again. (Ok, the reader format does write some files to the card. This is evidently necessary.)

At some point in this process, the problems went away and the device + card began to behave normally, finishing transfers quickly and booting up in a minute or two. It has continued to behave without problems since. (And yes, I did manage to fill up a 16GB card and get a "disk full" issue. (Calibre really doesn't handle that as well as I would expect. You have to look at the log for why the transfer failed, after the fact.))

[The_Bird]

Hi

I got exactly the same kind of problem than bagby with a Kingston 8Gb SD card (class 4)

Communication with the device his awfully slow and I begin to be desperate

[bagby]

Try doing a full format on the card in Windows, using FAT32, then have the reader format the card and see if that helps.

I'm convinced that this is a system issue, not something Calibre is doing.

[The_Bird]

Thank you for the hint... It did indeed help !
Now the calibre/T1 communication phase last around 5 minutes...

[LuvReadin]

The card does seem to make a difference. I had to try a reset on my old ereader; first card I tried did nothing (lost count of the number of times I went through the very awkward button sequence), then I found that other people had the same problem; transferred all the files to another card, and hey presto! worked first time.

[bagby]

It's good that things are a little faster, but this isn't the way they should be. Transfers to/from the reader should be VERY fast, and they are now for me. Most tasks are finished before I have time to check on their progress. Reading the contents of the card takes just a couple of seconds.

You might keep working with the card. Information about the card interaction is hard to come by, but this delay hints to me that Windows is repeatedly trying and failing some simple operations on the card, fanatically trying to write, write, write in a manner harking back to MS-DOS roots, where you could actually see this happen on the floppy disks of the time, with DOS actually telling you that it was busily retrying the same operation 50 times before deciding that it really wasn't working.

Make sure you've got that card as flat (empty) as possible. Use Diskpart to knock down all partition information. If the reader recognizes the card, you haven't done enough. Get it to the point where the reader won't do anything with the card without formatting it first.

This was a pain for me, but I haven't had a lick of trouble with it since.

[mieksje]

Defragmenting the sd card may also help