Just upgraded to v3 - opening the app sometimes take over a minute - sometimes does not open at all (rainbow spinner). The times that it does open I can only get thru a few pages of the upgrade guide tutorial before it locks up again. Checking Activiy Monitor on IMac - the mds_stores get huge and consume my CPU
Have you re-started your Mac lately?
Yes - I have to restart it - even if I kill Scrivener, my Mac doesn’t recover. I’m on High Sierra - wondering if there is a conflict there. But right now - it’s unusable on my Mac - I can’t get thru the Upgrade guide tutorial - it locks up within a minute or so once it opens.
You mentioned that if you kill the process the Mac still doesn’t recover—that more likely indicates a deeper problem than the software that triggered it. Scrivener might be the catalyst, but in theory a normal Cocoa level program won’t hard crash the system or even destabilise it. It usually takes drivers or other kernel extensions to do something of that magnitude—if it isn’t a deeper underlying macOS bug.
Since you’ve just upgraded to the latest operating system, it might be a good idea to go through any potential out of date programs. Logitech drives, cams, audio—even if it seems unrelated to Scrivener, given its dependency on the Mac’s multimedia libraries for its research capabilities, it can raise awareness of issues that otherwise wouldn’t be raised with a text editor.
I’d also increase the amount of diagnostic information you’re working with. Keep Console running and in Scrivener’s settings, enable the internal error alerts option in the General: Warnings preferences, once you get in. In Activity Monitor you can also generate process samples when a program hangs.
But first: mds_stores by the way is a Spotlight routine. Might be a good idea to flush the whole index and have the system rebuild it from scratch (Onyx is a good tool for that if you aren’t comfortable using the shell). It will take a while, and slow things down until it’s done, so maybe do so before calling it a night and leave it running.
Thanks - that’s so good info - and as much as it’s easier to blame the program - you are probably right that I have something bigger on my hands! I did load v3 onto my laptop (that is not High Sierra) and have not had any issues. Time to roll up my sleeves - thanks again for the suggestions to start.
I too complained about this. I have reinstalled my IOS on my brand new MacBook Pro. There is a serious bug in the Scriv. vs. 3. I’m intending to roll back if I can get any support.
An update - I have been having better success the last day. I start with only Scrivener open and slowly add back apps - and so far - only locked up once that I remember - after I opened up a Parallels session. My Parallels is seriously out of date - so that could be it.
The other thing I did that may have helped resolve it - I changed in Scrivener preferences - the auto-save from the default 2 seconds of inactivity - to more like 30/60 seconds. that might have helped, as I notice I get the rainbow spinner occasionally now when it auto-saves, but it doesn’t lock up.
How is mds_store taking up a bunch of resources a “serious Scrivener 3 bug”? You can roll back at any time you if you wish though.
Thanks for the update; glad to hear things are a little bit better. If there is a big performance spike whenever Scrivener has to touch the disk, where reducing auto-save helps, I’d look into two things:
- Run Disk Utility’s check and make sure the disk does not require repair.
- From there you should also be able to easily see whether the disk might be overloaded with data. Try to leave at least 10% free.
And of course, if the project itself is stored on a slow medium, like a thumb drive or file server (even LAN), we might expect severely degraded performance during auto-saves. There isn’t so much one can do about that other than tune the auto-save as you have.
I’m still struggling with v3 on my iMac. Some days it is OK - but once it is not - it gets painful. Right now, it’s back to not being able to open. The only thing running the background is my backup service - Crashplan.
I can get it to open mostly without issue in Safe Mode. Any clues what may be the additional item(s) running once out of Safe Mode that could cause Scrivener to lock up during opening?
Okay that’s a good clue that Safe Mode seems to help. What I like to do after that test is log in with the Shift key held down. I don’t mean to reboot, that puts you in safe mode, but merely log out, and then as soon as you type in your credentials and hit Return, hold down the Shift key until fully logged in. This will nearly all automatically loaded software from running. If things go smoothly in that state, with just Scrivener and Finder, then gradually start running the things you typically use in the background.
Otherwise, places to check:
- The Users & Groups: Login Items tab in System Preferences.
- In both your user folder and at the system level, the Library/LaunchDaemons and Library/LaunchAgents folders.