Calibre slow on Mac (colour wheel on every move)

[kch]

Hello,

I am running Calibre 5.8.1 on macOS 10.14.6 and I'm experiencing a laggy, spinning colour wheel problem.
Whenever I try to scroll, select or point to any item in my library (of only 40 books), Calibre freezes for around 5 seconds and spins the colour wheel before being able to make a move. This happens no matter I'm connecting or not to any devices.

It also occurs when I switch to another application (e.g. Firefox) and then switch back to Calibre.

This problem began to happen a few updates back. So far I have been hoping that it would go away after some newer updates. I remember it has never been like this before updating to Calibre 5.

I have already tried reinstalling Calibre but that unfortunately does not help. I also searched and crawled a few threads and tried using Disk Utility to repair my SSD but that hasn't done anything helpful either…

Would very much appreciate any guidance on putting an end to this. Thanks in advance.

[kovidgoyal]

If you think its because of calibre 5, dwngrade to calibre 4.23 and see if the problem goes away.

[kch]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

If you think its because of calibre 5, dwngrade to calibre 4.23 and see if the problem goes away.

Thanks for your advice.

I first tried Library maintenance > Check library and applied all fixes and deletes. It didn't really help improve the situation.

Then I tried downgrading to 4.23 but the problem unfortunately persists. I then backed the library, reinstalled it anew, and noticed that Calibre runs fast at the beginning. But as soon as I import back the library backup, it becomes slow again.

In the end, I reinstalled Calibre and started a new library. I manually loaded all the books again. Now it is running smooth and fine.

I realised in the library directory folder there is now a ‘metadata.opf’ that comes with the newly load files and books. It wasn't there before in the directory with any of the books I had from the old library. Not sure if that was a cause to the problem I experienced.