user note Significant performance degradation when importing user notes folder

[Steven S]

Environment

• Accordance 14.0.7
• Windows 11 [Version 10.0.22621.2134]

 

Description
When importing a user notes folder, Accordance 14.0.7 exhibits severe performance degradation (greater than one order of magnitude) over 13.3.4.

 

Reproduction frequency
Always.

 

Reproduction steps

1. Extract the contents of the attached archive, notes-test.zip (notes-test.zip). The extracted folder contains 19 user note files.
2. Run the File > User Files > Import Notes Folder... command.
3. When prompted to enter the imported user notes file name, choose an appropriate value, and click OK.
4. When prompted to select the folder to import, choose the notes-test folder you extracted in step (1), and click OK.

 

Expected behavior
The user notes folder should be imported in a reasonable amount of time. For comparison, it takes 13.3.4 approximately 5 seconds to import the same 19 files.

 

Actual behavior
It takes 3 minutes and 45 seconds to import the 19 files, an increase of 4,400% over 3.3.4.

 

Notes
During the import, Accordance saturates one logical CPU.

 

Upon completion of the import, Accordance crashes. However, upon restarting Accordance and opening the new user notes item in the workspace, it appears to have been imported successfully.

Please note that my complete set of user notes consists of more than 4,800 files. At 14.0.7's average import rate, it would take nearly 16 hours to process, whereas it usually takes 3.3.4 around 15 minutes to do the same thing.

[Dr. Nathan Parker]

Thanks! We'll look into this.

[Dr. Nathan Parker]

I can't reproduce this on my Windows PC. The files import in seconds and seem to process OK. We might need additional info.

[Steven S]

Thanks for attempting to reproduce, @Nathan Parker. I've been doing all my v14 testing on a VM. I'll try resetting it to an earlier state and run my tests again as soon as I get a chance.

[Dr. Nathan Parker]

Sounds good. Yeah the VM may cause some performance issues, although a bit strange that 13 performed well. It runs speeds on my bare-metal Windows 11 machine.

[Steven S]

Hi @Nathan Parker. After some more testing, I'm going to chalk this up to something with my VM and not an Accordance regression. I was able to get the test to run in a few seconds about 25% of the time; the remaining runs began slowly importing each file either from the very first one or after a few files had been processed. I haven't been able to pin down exactly what triggers the slowdown, but I believe it to be related to the limited resources I've allocated to the guest VM (my host only has 8 GiB and 4 cores ). The various experiments I ran didn't reveal something I could specifically point to as the cause.

 

Let's go ahead and consider this issue closed. Thanks for testing this independently and giving me a second data point to consider.

 

16 hours ago, Nathan Parker said:

although a bit strange that 13 performed well

 

Sorry, I should have mentioned this in the OP. My v13 tests are running on bare metal. (While I expected some performance degradation on the VM, I didn't expect so much. ). I plan on setting up another VM for v13 so that when I finally do upgrade my production environment to v14, I'll be able to test my user Bibles for backward compatibility as long as v13 is supported. At that time, I'll run the same test on the v13 VM and will drop a note here confirming whether or not I see the same behavior I reported on v14.

[Dr. Nathan Parker]

Sounds good! Yeah in that type of VM environment, things are going to be a bit slow. I've worked on those (and even lower) VM specs in the past. :-)

[Steven S]

Just to put a bow on this.... I created a second VM, identical in configuration to the one I've been using for 14.0.7 testing, but installed 13.4.2 on it. I ran the same test in the OP 20 times, and it passed 100% of the time (in the sense that it took around 5 seconds to complete the import). For comparison, I reran the test on 14.0.7, also 20 times. In this case, it only passed 35% of the time (and in 43% of those cases, Accordance crashed after the import). One of those crashes produced a log, which I've attached (import-16-crash-log.txt).

 

So it would seem that there probably is a new issue in v14 related to importing a notes folder, but it apparently only manifests when under significant resource pressure, as it is in my VM. In the event the dev team would like to try to reproduce such a testing environment at some point, I've pasted the specs of the VirtualBox VM below:

 

[Dr. Nathan Parker]

Thanks for the info!