Family Historian User Group

Have been working with the V4 upgrade version. Having some issues with FH attempting to hog all my laptop resources. Specifically it seems to be grabbing >90% CPU time for long periods, often nearer 99% continuously (according to Task Manager), even though I am not actually doing anything. After about 15 minutes this activity suddenly ceases and we are back to 'normal', ie a small amount of activity when moving around within the programme.
It's lucky I have additional cooling fans underneath, the laptops own fans are screaming like a jumbo jet taking off
Very strange - any ideas what it might be up to?
Brian

Acer Ferrari 4005
AMD Turion 64 mobile ML37 1.6GHz
2gb RAM
Windows XP Home SP3 (32 bit)
Gedcom Record Counts...
   Individual Records:8018
   Family Records: 1974
   Note Records: 1060
   Source Records: 2888
   Repository Records: 0
   Submitter Records: 1
   Submission Records: 0
   Multimedia Records: 2619

ID:3622

I suspect it might be the large number of multimedia files. I think FH builds thumbnails of the linked images in the background when you load the project.

hmmm - Thanks Jane, I thought it might be something like that. So it's going to rebuild thumbnails every time I load up? I'll have a play around, try loading the multimedia list straight away & put a stopwatch on it. MM records are only going to increase. Is 2700 records a lot then? I know my machine is a few years old now, but it's no slouch!
Brian

PS I think I can confirm the theory. Just loaded up & the frantic 10-15 minutes activity did indeed end when the multimedia list page was fully populated

I think it does it as a background job, so you should find the program will still perform correctly. Is response slow while the machine is busy or is it simply that it's working hard in the background?

How much memory do you have in the laptop?

Bit of both really Jane. From the fan noise, core temperature increase and cpu usage it is clearly working very hard, and by grabbing such a large cpu allocation it does noticeably slow down everything.
15 minutes seems to be par for the course; excluding the FH project directory from the resident virus scanner only knocks off maybe a minute from that
Brian

It's not something which came up during beta testing. I am sure Calico will address it as soon as they can.

Not much of a help, but my best suggestion for now is to leave FH up all the time and perhaps consider using Hibernate rather than shutting down, if you are going to be working on FH most of the time. Not ideal, but I can't find any place to turn off caching in the preferences.

I'm ahead of you there Jane[smile]. That is indeed my plan; be interesting to get feedback from anyone with a larger multimedia collection
Brian

Now I am worried. I run V3 on an old P2-400 laptop with 128MB of RAM, its all I have. V3 runs OK until I try to generate a CD. This takes up to three hours. If V4 have such an overhead I may not be able upgrade and still have a useable system. Has anyone had experience of using V4 on a low spec PC?

I don't have any thing that old. The problem Brian is having is tied to the 2,700 images he has attached to his file. Do you have large numbers of images attached to your gedcom file?

Just a couple of hundred - thats what slows down the CD generation. I'll have to save up the pennies for a new PC - If I can persuade my wife that I need one !!

Oh you do [grin], never have any problems get equipment in my house, I am married to a techie. So as long as I pay I can have.

One option if you are currently paying for Broadband is to look at the offers where you get a free laptop when you sign up with certain suppliers for their Broadband, PC World were doing this, but I don't know if they still are.

Thanks Jane, V4 has just arrived at home, I'm at work so I'll find out soon.

Brian,
I have 4027 files in the Media folder and after setting up V4 do not see HD activity when viewing thumbnails. Click on scroll buttons is smooth but drag the slider is unpredictable - it tends to jump back to the top when released. Another issue is the 'Work with External File Links' tool - it takes 8 seconds to populate the window.
This is on Vista 64 bit, an i7 CPU with 6GB DDR3.

I'm not surprised - you've got just a tad more processing power there than I have[cry]. It's not actually HD activity but cpu load that is the problem.
Shame it can't make use of the thumbs.db file already in the media directories.
Brian

I would also add that the thread that is doing the background processing should be of a lower priority than it currently is so that it doesn't put so much load on the CPU nor make it difficult to use other programs.

I hope that it doesn't make thumbnails EVERY time you start the program. Even with a moderate number of images it would be more worthwhile to cache the thumbnails in the media directory.

All,
To force a worst case scenario I disabled paging and with FH + usual background apps this pushed physical memory usage to around 1.4GB. Rapid movement of the thumbnails slider gave a momentary 20% CPU usage dropping back to <1%. Using the scroll wheel to run through thumbnails - all thumbnails complete with a smooth scroll.
I have used other family history apps. with thumbnails stored in a relational database for file sizes around 600MB. No problems but needs good indexing.

Could be that the paging file is getting a heavy workload, with Family Historian and relatively small amounts of ram, as the number of thumbnails is significantly increased. Vista is a memory hog without several hundred thumbnails!

Jon - yes it rebuilds EVERY time, so if you close between sessions (which I tend to do) you go through it all again. Once the thumnails have been created (abt 15 mins on my machine) everything is fine, no scrolling delay or anythig

It does not preclude any other work, but does make things a bit jerky & slow to respond

dhwalt - I've got 2gb ram & have not noticed any appreciable pagefile activity (watching via Task Manager). It is purely cpu load.

Well, I installed V4 to the old laptop last night - it is useable. I do get a lot of disk activity for about 10 mins once the program has started which realy slows things down, but after that its not so bad. I haven't tried to generate a CD yet - thats for the weekend. I , like many others I suspect, do our family trees on a tight budget and can't always afford the latest gear. Its reassuring to know that V4 will work on lower spec machines.

V4.0.2 has an option to turn off the automatic caching of thumbnails, it's in preferences, under the advanced button of the general tab.