Solved the HORRIBLE response time in my 2019
Windows 10, but it might be applicable to Apple. About 5 days ago my 2019 ON1 took a nose dive. Up until that time, it was usable. I have a powerful computer with lots of memory and a top end Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 with 8GB of memory. All of my working drives are either NVMe or SSDs. No spinners.
When I was in Browse, and in a subdirectory that had lots of images, if I scrolled down thru the thumbnails, at some point during the scrolling, my machine would lock up for up to 7 minutes. No mouse, no clock update, no nothing. Sometimes even my screens would go black like the computer rebooted. But it did not reboot. If I waited long enough, the machine would clear it's bottleneck. But then all I had to do was scroll down or up in a catalog folder and it would do it again! In the same catalog directory no less! WTH ???
I had no issues running 2018.5 on any of these catalog directories. I tried Process Lasso, and a smaller version called CPUBalance. I tried lowering ON1's process priority to Low. I took away 10 (of the 12) processors from ON1. I tweaked the GPU via the NVidia control panel. I deleted the scratch and cache under ON1 program settings. Nothing made any difference. I have almost 40 years of Windows programming under my belt and Linux too. This was mind blowing. Then all of a sudden I happened to notice that the System OP drive (which is a screaming e.vme) was being bombarded with I/O. Or at least that was a view in Task Manager that I noticed right after the lockdown freed itself. Then it dawned on me... The browse catalog itself is doing something very, very bad.
From an old bug ticket I submitted, I knew the catalog was stored in the following directory. I also knew that ON1 would create a new directory if it was not there.
C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\ON1\ON1 Photo RAW 2019/ExploreService
So I went and renamed that ExploreService directory to something else and when ON1 started up, it said I had no catalog. And when I went to the drive folders that corresponded to the catalog folders that were causing my machine to go into lockdown for 6 or 7 minutes at a time, it did NOT have any lockdown. I could scroll up and down to my hearts desire. Woohoo!!!!
So I added the hard drive directories back into the empty catalog. I gave ON1 an hour or so to get smart about the catalog. Then I went back into the catalog and I had the same lockdown issues as before while scrolling down thru thumbnails. Sad, but at least the problem is repeatable.
I then went into the Local Drive area that has the original folders that I just put into the catalog. And when I scrolled up and down in the Local Drive area (Not the catalog), it STILL froze and did a lockdown. Minutes went by, mouse movement stopped.
So I went back to an empty catalog. Now I am accessing my images via the Local Drive section and I am able to do all of my edits, scrolling, etc without any system freezing or lockdowns.
Bottom line: There is something very seriously wrong with the catalogs and how they are used in ON1 2019. If you can do without catalogs for the time being, you may want to try renaming your catalog folder and working in the Local Drive area and see if you are getting better results. I am not going to submit this as a ticket because I have no idea how they expect me to send that amount of data to them. I just hope that enough of the existing browse issues point to this problem and they will get a patch out soon.
It could very well be a GPU issue as I have no way to telling if the computer is still functioning and only the displays are locked down. But I have two monitors both are frozen as well as the mouse. I am using the latest NVidia driver on my GeForce GTX 1080 with 8GB of ram.
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Just a note... You better have sidecars enabled before you even consider renaming the ExploreService directory. Or you will loose all of your edits. But as long as you simply rename the directory, you can always rename it back. If you do not have sidecars turned on, do it now and then touch all of the images. You can use the "heart" toggle to touch them. Toggle it twice if you do use the Heart for something. This will keep the heart settings you have used. When a image is touched, the sidecar files will be created from the internal database.
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I once noticed On1 going crazy with writes to the database files in the NDService folder. I don't have a lot of images. They are cataloged. The catalog is done.
One I noticed some activity while idle in the browser with some system tray bugs I have active (Hwinfo64). I then logged all disk access in the system. On1 was going crazy constantly rewriting all the database files (lbd). It was only occasionally reading 16K or 32K from one of the files. It was *never* reading any of my photos. Each ldb file was about 2MB and each was being re-written in whole, over and over and over again. Such action would kill my SSD over time as this is where the database files are stored (system drive).
I can imagine that with large DB files such occurrences could bring a system to it's knees. Not with my wimpy photo set.
I closed On1 and re-opened and this situation did not repeat.
While it was occurring I did record a screen video of the crazy database writes.
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That does sound like a valid explanation as to what was going on. Beating the hard drive to death. I am fairly confident that I isolated it away from a CPU issue with the affinity settings. Well, I am going to keep an empty catalog until the next fix release and see what happens.
Another symptom which is gone now since I removed the catalog...
ON1 PR was consuming about 13% of the CPU resources while doing nothing at all. All the time. It never settled down below that level.
Now, without a catalog, ON1 is idling at 0.1% CPU usage.
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I can reproduce this. ON1 is killing my SSD with mindless repetitive writes.
I opened ON1 and there was heavy disk access read and write to the NDservice database folder. I know ON1 keeps a few backups of the DB folders. e.g. core and core_bak_X, and so on. I let that clear.
On1 opened into my "PhotoTemp" folder. This folder is not cataloged. On1 disk writes eventually settled down to none. So long as I was in a non cataloged folder the NDService DB files were quiet. Lately I have been spending a bunch of time in my PhotoTemp folder.
I then navigated to a cataloged folder. The NDService\core database access when crazy and stayed that way. On1 was *never* accessing any of my photos for reads. Or the sidecar files. They only occasionally read from one of the 39 DB files. Typically 8/16/32K reads. However the writes were 14MB per second. The reads per second normally averaged zero bytes per second because, as stated, there were only very occasional reads from that DB folder.
I looked at the size of each DB file and it seemed that each of the DB files was updated in entirety or close to it. Every couple of seconds or so. That 14MB of writes per second never stops. I am not doing anything but watch the resource monitor or Process monitor application window monitoring the disk activity. As stated, everything is cataloged and my photos are not being looked at. All activity is purely in the database files. Probably ~99.9% write, with the odd tiny read.
It seems like there is some boolean flag that says, update the DB, and it is never being cleared after the DB has been updated.
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Norman, Did you send open a ticket on it? You should be able to just point them to this thread with the details you have collected.
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Kevin, I think you should just copy your first post and send it in. I'd be more confident knowing that they were given this info before the next update comes out.
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Rick, I did better than that, hopefully. I sent them a link to this forum post.
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I removed my catalog. I confirm that the excess writes have stopped.
There is of course still some DB access to the NDService folder and the PerfectBrowseCache folder. Non cataloged folders still have a browser cache and I believe that some of this data is in the PerfectBrowseCache folder. NDService is still involved at some level.
Now when I go to a folder that was previously cataloged, I think it wants to fill in the non cataloged browser cache data. I see heavy, heavy reads of the photos in that folder. I see some writes to the NDService DB files. The write amounts seem reasonable. I see writes to the perfect browse cache folder. What is see is massive reads and some writes. What I would expect for an app that is caching thumbnails and the like when first visiting the folder and the pictures are not cached.
So first time they will be cached. Subsequent visits depends on the cache size. Preferences does limit the browse cache size. I've no idea if their browse cache limit setting actually works. I do remember that the "empty" button never seemed to do anything.
I'll probably catalog one folder or two just for testing if this gets fixed. So long as the crazy writes don't happen when I avoid those folder(s). If fixed then I'll catalog all again. The search filtering and such is just nice to have.
I've not has the best luck with On1 support. Recently I reported a couple of reproducible items, which I also provided data file(s), and they went unresponded and marked as solved. I sent a complaint to customer service and then one of the two reports did get responded to. The bug I was reported had already been fixed (and I have that fix). The other is still vapor "solved" (this one is luckily not that big a deal for me).
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I created a couple of cataloged folders for future testing. As long as I startup On1 and avoid those folders I don't get the excessive DB writing.
During the catalog operation ON1 is still grossly inefficient. The total data in the NDService\core on ldb files is 72MB. I watched 3.5MB per sec get written to the various files in that folder for about 4 minutes. Approx 800MB total. The files never really increased in size. I don't think those files reduced in size when I removed my catalog previously. The app appears to repeatedly write and overwrite to those files. Wasteful.
This excess is a good way to kill the life of an SSD. It would not be so bad if they did not get into a loop constantly writing to those files in the conditions previously discussed. That is the real killer, and then of course potential performance issues.
On1 build 6167
Windows 10, i7 4770K @4Ghz, 16GB ram, GTX 1080
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Thanks Norman. I have no doubt that what you have observed is exactly what happened to me. The directories that were in my catalog were about 400 GB. I wonder how much life of the NVMe drive was lost and I am certainly not going to allow ON1 to each any more of the life away until they get it fixed.
When I submitted the ticket, I pointed to this post and I told them that you had some very good observations.
There are many, many posts about how slow 2019 is and these posts are from folks who have extremely high-end systems (Xenon processors, etc). I would be willing to bet that this problem that you and I have observed is the core problem for all of these complaints.
Hopefully, ON1 developers have already become aware of this and are working on it. Fingers crossed.
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Thanks for the info Kevin.
I have renamed the ExploreService directory and fired up ON1 2019.
I got a missing memory cache location message.
This has made a tremendous improvement. I can now browse my raw files without any delays.
However, I still get several seconds delays in the develop module every time I make an adjustment to the image.
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Andre, about the only thing I can suggest to you is to make sure your NVIDIA drivers are up to date. I saw that you have already played with the NVIDIA settings and to be honest, ON1 does not seem to use much of the GPU during normal editing anyway. You can try running the Resource Monitor and take note of anything which looks abusive. Like tons of Disk I/O... While in Resource Monitor, you can select ON1 Photo Raw (put a check by it in the CPU Window) and that will help isolate things down for you.
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Kevin, I think I may have stumbled upon the solution to the slow response time I was experiencing in the develop module. I was about to follow your advice as to the resource monitor when in ON1 2019 I closed the presets I had previously selected. All of a sudden, any adjustment to an image happened immediatly.
I selected a preset once again and was able to repeat the problem, Closing the presets once again fixed it.
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Andre, I certainly believe that the left hand pane with presets open is going to burden the computer resources. ON1 is trying keep all of the presets visible "accurate" to reflect your photo. I make it a point to close the whole left pane while editing, unless I am adding borders or LUTs or something that a preview would be helpful with. But I only keep the left pane open while previewing.
Great catch.
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2019 is completely unusable for me now, it just keeps getting worse and worse. Tried re-installing several times, many tips from this forum were tried, sent a ticket to support and they can't seem to do anything......
I'm back using 2018 and wishing 2019 would work.....
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Thanks very much Kevin for your suggestion to rename ExploreServices. I was just going out of my mind this morning trying to edit a couple of pictures, everything was just so slow it just did not make any sense to me, plus of course a couple of crashes as a toping!! After the rename everything seems to be in order.
Thanks again,
Antoine
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Today, after contacting support, ON1 Photo RAW 2019 is working as it should on my computer. Presets and the Browse Image Cache are no longer slowing ON1.
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This post and working with the files without the catalog from "Local Drives" just gave On1 another chance as my RAW editor, at least for a while until they either fix it or give me a refund.
Thank you very much. :)
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So, if instead of renaming a directory or reinstalling a clean copy, I just went into On1 PR 2019 and removed all my cataloged folders so that I will be only working out of the local drive folders. Any idea if taking this route will help with this issue?
Thanks,
Dave
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I did not know how to remove the cataloged folders and I found it easier to just rename the directory. Also if they resolve the problem associated with the cataloged folders, all what I will have to do to access my catalog is to remove the Underscore I added to the original name, That is it. Hope it will help Dave.
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I just did a right-click on the cataloged folder in the Browse pane at the left, and one of the choices was to remove the cataloged folder. Seems to have worked. I figure that, once the problem is fixed, I'll just add the cataloged folders back in.
Dave
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In my case, I have a cataloged folder per year, so it is much easier for me to rename the directory. By the way, I just activated the catalogs and I can hardly write this note, ON1 is taking over 90% of my CPU and I have no clue what it is busy doing!!!! Back to renaming for sure.
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Antoine, when you first activate catalogs, On1 needs to scan every photo and add it to the new catalog. It's going to pretty much take over your PC to do that (It's not supposed to, but it will). If you can, just let On1 do it's thing until it's done. After the catalogs are built, On1 will only make your PC incredibly slow when it needs to, to keep the catalogs updated.
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Rick, I cataloged my folders after installing the new version, but I had to rename the directory, as suggested in this forum to be able to work with ON1. Today I tried to bring them back to life and ON1 practically took over the CPU, I suppose as you said it was trying to update these catalogs. One thing I noticed is that this problem is at its worst when I am in Browse, as soon as I move to Edit it relinquishes at least half of its CPU percentage, it drops from around 90% to 40%. Have you experienced this phenomena?? In summary I can hardly work with ON1 with the catalogs on if any other application is active, so I have no other choice at this stage but to get rid of the catalog feature and forfeit some of its nice features.
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Thanks to Kevin et. al. I was able to solve a related On12 2019 catalog problem, namely of files showing up on search (as named but blank thumbnails that were no longer on my system. I found the ExploreService folder on my iMac, renamed it and restarted Photo Raw. Low and behold, searches work right now and catalog seems to be clean of all old/duplicate files.
There are clearly some glitches in the 2019 catalog that were not there (for me at least) in 2018 and 2018.5. Great community help!
Mike R.
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I deleted my Catalog. Unfortunately, my CPU is still at 13%.
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I am going to repost a link to a post of mine. It seems to be directly related to catalog issues. I mean to say, slowness issues that are seen and felt while:
- scrolling thru a catalog of a bunch of photos
- apparent disk accessing issues that 2019 seems to want to do (that are related to the catalog) every time you start it up.
- slider response when there are a lot of filters being used
- the left pane open and filled with various copies of the image you are editing that ON1 is trying to keep updated as you edit the sliders. Such as presets.
It does not fix the color dropper issue in local, and probably a whole host of other debilitating performance issues that have arisen since 2019 was released.
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I experienced crashing only after using Lightroom Migration Tool.
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Well, I came here as I had had a kind of a problem I thought was similar. I selected to catalog two pretty huge folders with my photos (family photos with subfolders year by year, that means literally tens of thousand photos). I left the PC catalog overnight. In the morning, it crashed and I was not able to launch since then.I saw "not responding" in my Task Manager, exchange of data with disk, network (a bit of), the memory use changed time from time, CPU use at 0.2-0.4 but nothing happened even after minutes. Under another account on the same PC ON1 PR 2019.5 (7007) worked fine so it was obviously the catalog to have caused the problem. Tried different tricks, swap renamed and used one of the older backups to no avail. First, Kevin Pinkerton's advice extended to NDService helped. I renamed them (just to be able to go back if necessary) and voila, the app launched, finally (of course, no cataloged folders but it works). I have sidecars enabled. I found new ExploreService and NDService folders in the original directory. So far for my experience, no responsibility for anybody repeating this though.
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I've intermittently had the same issue, with On1, with Lightroom and other graphics heavy softyware and it has always been the out of date graphics driver that causes the issue. Try updating it via the NVIDIA or AMD Radeon website and don't rely on Windows update which can be months behind. Both NVIDiA and AMD Radeon have apps to install that make the update process easy and will notify you when an update is available.
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