Accordance slow?

[Alistair]

I'm finding that Accordance is running slowly on my Mac, by which I mean looking up a single verse takes a noticeable fraction of a second or so, and I can hear the hard drive buzzing as it does so. This is on an iMac with a Fusion drive, while on my MacBookPro with SSD it is almost instantaneous. I know the SSD makes a difference, but I remember the good old days when all drives were solid state and Accordance was lightning fast back then.

 

I have rebooted the iMac in safe mode, and Accordance is noticeably faster. Now, I have installed a number of other utilities including various security programs, anti-virus/malware, VPN etc, and I wonder if these are producing the Accordance slowdown. (Duh, of course they are, as booting in safe mode shows.)

 

My question is this, short of a clean install of the OS (Mojave in this case, not Catalina for specific reasons), or by disabling and re-enabling the various system add-ons, can one of the Accordance tech gurus help me figure out what is causing the slowdown?

 

(Mind you, the iMac would no doubt benefit from a clean installation of the OS and a decluttering of the HD. I used to do this once a year.)

 

Thanks in advance,

 

Alistair

 

 

[Joel Brown]

Old platter hard drives are indeed much, much slower than SSDs.  Accordance does a lot of file i/o, so this indeed would cause the program to slow down a bit.  However, some things come to mind:

 

1) Do you need to defragment your drive?  Not sure if this is a thing anymore, but back in the day, this was a good way to improve HDD speeds.

2) My guess is that one of your security programs is monitoring and checking all disk i/o, and this is what the slowdown is.  I'm not sure what programs you have, or how you have them configured, but I have definitely seen some more robust apps try to monitor every area of the computer, including all file reads and writes.

3) Do you have full-disk encryption turned on?  This also slows down all file i/o.

4) Perhaps you can narrow down the slowdown in Accordance.  Is it all texts and tools?  All verses?  What if you make a clean workspace with only one tab open, and display just one verse, is it also slow?

[Donald Cobb]

I don't know if this is connected to Allistair's issue, but I notice that there is a somewhat significant speed difference in going to a passage when 1) only one ressource is concerned or 2) when a ressource is tied to others. One several of my workspaces I can have as many as four tabs tied to the main ressource. In that case, there is often a little bit of a lag going to another passage or just scrolling down in the text.

 

The same goes for the information panel updating from one verse to the next when scrolling down through the chapter of a Biblical book, for instance.

 

That lag is not an issue when a ressource isn't tied to anything else and there is only the text (and sometimes a parallel ressource).

 

Perhaps that can help. 

[Alistair]

Old platter hard drives are indeed much, much slower than SSDs.  Accordance does a lot of file i/o, so this indeed would cause the program to slow down a bit.  However, some things come to mind:

 

1) Do you need to defragment your drive?  Not sure if this is a thing anymore, but back in the day, this was a good way to improve HDD speeds.

2) My guess is that one of your security programs is monitoring and checking all disk i/o, and this is what the slowdown is.  I'm not sure what programs you have, or how you have them configured, but I have definitely seen some more robust apps try to monitor every area of the computer, including all file reads and writes.

3) Do you have full-disk encryption turned on?  This also slows down all file i/o.

4) Perhaps you can narrow down the slowdown in Accordance.  Is it all texts and tools?  All verses?  What if you make a clean workspace with only one tab open, and display just one verse, is it also slow?

 

1) Defragmentation is not advised for a fusion drive (it's a self-managing combo of small SSD and big platter drive).

2) You are probably correct, but there's no quick to way to find out which one.

3) Yes, but in safe mode that doesn't appear to make any difference

4) Slowdown is more noticeable in a verse reference, e.g. "3 John" but also in simple searches e.g. "God" or "the"