Good Afternoon,
Sometimes while working in Scrivener, my entire laptop (MacBook Pro, macOS 10.13.3, i7, 16gb ram) will completely freeze. mouse pad is unresponsive, keyboard, etc. this lasts for about 5 seconds. This is not a “regular” event, but could occur once an hour or twice in ten minutes.
This did not happen on Scrivener 2 (and this doesn’t not happen if Scrivener is not open).
Any thoughts?
Gary
I would check background processes. I ran into a case like this a few years ago where Scrivener (and really everything, but it seemed more noticeable in Scrivener) would periodically freeze. So I opened up Console and let it run in the background, and Activity Monitor as well so I could switch over and see if during these spikes if something was consuming a lot of hardware.
Turns out I had a poorly configured background utility that was running a deep indexing procedure every five or ten minutes and seizing as much of the CPU and disk I/O as it could. It impacted Scrivener most obviously because if it was attempting to auto-save during that spike in usage, its request was getting stuck in the disk I/O queue and locking me out of using the software until completed. I probably could have bumped up the auto-save interval, but that would have been a bandaid. The real solution was upgrading this particular utility and flushing its caches so that it was no longer getting stuck in an indexing loop.
Check your autosave interval, too. The default interval is very short, and can lead to the symptoms you describe if Scrivener is trying to save the project when you haven’t actually paused. Scrivener -> Preferences -> Saving
Katherine
Probably not the same issue but I froze S3 today. I was searching a project and changed my mind about the search term. Instead of a single word, i wanted to search for a phrase,. As I was deleting some letters in the word with a view to inserting a ’ S hung. Force quit, reopen, all ok. I shall know for next time to decide the search term in advance of entering it in the search box.
Well, ordinarily that wouldn’t be something you would have to worry about. Who’s to say what happened there, it doesn’t quite sound like what the original poster was talking about though, but if it happens over and over it might be something we can take a look at.
Thanks for all of the suggestions.
I have been running “activity monitor” to try to catch it in the act. I’m still not absolutely positive that it’s scrivener doing this. It may have just been bad timing that the freezing coincided with the upgrade.
it hasn’t happened lately, so it might have just been a gremlin…