Family Historian User Group

This was covered in a post last month and the OP was satisfied with the answer - hence a new thread.

My gedcom is 18M in size and routinely takes about 6 seconds to load and 18 seconds to save. When the latter is happening (particularly on autosave) you're not aware but any data entry doesn't go in, the app locks up until the save is completed. Its getting quite frustrating.

I'm on FH v7.0.2 and its installed on a pc running windows 10 - the OS is fully up to date and the disc has been error checked and defragged.

The project files are on a NAS that is cabled - no other users or processor intensive apps running. Data transfer speeds from PC to NAS are consistently 320-330Mbs for both read and write.

It's only been a problem since the introduction of FH7 and I'm not aware of any slowdown of file saves to the NAS with other apps, such as Photoshop.

Any thoughts or is this one for CP?

Thanks in advance.

If I understand your metrics correctly, the GEDCOM should transfer in less than a second.

This is a stab in the dark...
Internally, I strongly suspect that FH works in UTF-16 with typically 2-bytes per character.
In FH V6 the default GEDCOM encoding was UTF-16 so no conversion was required when loading/saving.
In FH V7 the default GEDCOM encoding is UTF-8 which requires conversion on loading/saving (although not much).
So try changing Tools > Preferences > File Load/Save to Save in UTF-16 file format
The GEDCOM will be twice the size but no conversion is involved.

It would be a useful exercise to try a copy the project locally. How long does the load save cycle take?

Also it might be worth checking if your Anti-virus is disabled (temporally) does that make any difference to the speed

Jane, is that a like for like comparison?
Copying a whole Project includes Media, Public folder, etc, whereas Auto-Save only copies the GEDCOM file.

Perhaps temporarily relocating the Project to the local drive and monitoring Auto-Save there would be interesting.

Mike's suggestion of switching the utf format to 16 had a definite impact - 18 secs is now 12 secs. No change to anything if I switched security off.

I then copied the project folder to a usb drive and ran FH on a laptop from the usb drive. That load time was about 7 secs, save 4 secs..

Out of interest, I then ran FH from the laptop with project folders on the NAS over a 5g wireless connection with a very good signal

UTF-16 : 10 secs load - 44 secs save

Not UTF-16 : 13 secs load - 73 secs save

Finally, I then went back to basics and tried saving a 35M gedcom from the laptop to the NAS using internet explorer - it took about 3 seconds

Has that narrowed it down to a problem in FH7 bearing in mind FH6 was very much better?

Clearly, something interesting is going on, but I cannot get my head around your original statistics.
An 18 Megabyte file is 144 Megabits and at a transfer rate of 320 Megabits per sec should take much less than a second.
A 35 Megabyte file is 280 Megabits and at that transfer rate should take well under a second.
So why does even Windows Explorer take 3 seconds? Even allowing for disk latency that seems long.

As a baseline, have you tried it with the FH Project on the laptop internal drive, and using Windows Explorer to copy the 35Mb GEDCOM to the somewhere else on the same internal drive.

Windows explorer file copying issues are known. Here is one source to look at:
https://thegeekpage.com/fix-slow-file-c ... indows-10/

Hope that helps.

I have the same problem too, with a NAS this is directly cabled on a Gigabit switch. My PC has a Gigabit newtork card, and the NAS has two Gigabit connections to the switch, aggregated onto a single link. I will try the changes Mike suggested to see if it makes any difference.

Mike's suggestion of switching to UTF-16 save format halved the delay times even though, as he pointed out, it doubled the actual file size

I'm now in touch with Calico Pie and they have asked me to send them the gedcom that is taking so long to save so they can investigate it.

At the moment, all that has been established is there are no validation errors on the file and FH has been running quite happily for 8-10 years with all the data files on a NAS and no programme locking due to file saves.

I'll post an update here if I get anything from CP that might be useful for others to know.