Anki "processing..." between every single review

Anki Help
1

Upon restarting my pc and opening Anki, I can review cards as normal. After around 20-50 reviews, I started to get “Processing…” popup between almost every single review. This lasts .5-2 seconds per review.

Even when disabling all addons, this persists. It is slightly random in terms of when it will start happening upon opening anki fresh, but it will eventually happen. I originally thought it could be related to either AnkiConnect or FSRS, but disabling those two (or all addons) does not solve the issue.

I am on Windows 11 and I have an SSD installed. My PC is high spec, Ryzen 9 3900X, 32GB ram, and a 3080ti. I do not run heavy programs while doing anki reps, I have a couple browser windows open, spotify thats really it. I don’t think I should have major problems with Anki.

I actually experienced a worse version of this on my prior PC (the card would not flip over visually when I hit enter like a delay/lag) but I thought upon upgrading it would go away yet here I am.

The deck in question is a JP study deck, sentence card style. It has audio and images on the back side. There are around 20k cards in the deck.

Can anyone help me troubleshoot this? This is heavily disrupting my review sessions. When I use my phone to review on ankidroid there are no such isseus and my PC is far more powerful than my phone. I’ve used Anki for 10 years and I never had issues until somewhat recently.

I tried the troubleshooting guide already

  • Restarting has no real impact
  • Safe mode has no impact
  • Anki version is latest qt6
  • Database and media checked, no impact
  • Restart doesnt seem to change anything, although if processing is very slow a restart might solve it for 30 ish reviews
  • Video driver is direct3d, software did the same thing
2 Likes
2

Thank you for trying those Troubleshooting checklist things first. That helps narrow it down.

I have a few ideas, but I’ll admit they mostly of the “I wonder if…” variety. I’ll leave it up to you whether they sound worth trying or not. [In case it becomes helpful, this thread has ideas about what sorts of things cause it to pop up. How to find out what Anki is "Processing..."? - #6 by dae]

  1. If the cards are all from the same note type, is it possible that the templates are running scripts that are buggy or taking extra time to finish?

  2. Have you tried running Anki from a terminal window? It’s not a crash, but if there are errors being thrown, they might show up there.

  3. Have you tried exporting your collection as apkg or colpkg, and importing it into a fresh profile?

2 Likes
3

Thank you Danika for the reply.

  1. The issue doesn’t only happen on that note type. I have 6 decks of varying card complexity, and even on ones with 0 images, text only, no real css or templates, it still can occur.
  2. Tried running from terminal window. While doing normal reviewing, basically did not see any errors thrown. I am including the window screen to show some warnings did throw when opening and closing decks, but these were not at the time the processing issue happens.
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    image1107×357 11.7 KB
  3. I actually did this when I switched from my old PC to new PC and it didn’t resolve this issue.

My personal feeling is that I never had issues like this until a recent anki update. I really like certain features like FSRS so I cannot downgrade again, but I think I can’t be the only one having this issue if its happening to me across PCs?

Appreciate the time you took to try to diagnose. If you or anyone else has idea sfor how I can troubleshoot this I would be all ears. I am happy to provide any information needed as well.

To me it feels like every time I review a card my computer is doing some sort of insane processing that doesn’t need to be done. For example, if I turn a card over, and then try to copy paste some of the text on the card to my web browser, the command will take a few seconds to think before the paste occurs. I feel like Anki is consuming my PC resources like crazy to the point that I can’t even do a simple copy paste action.

The other thing I want to emphasize is that this doesn’t seem to be consistently reproducible. Sometimes cards will just be fine, then all of a sudden I get processing processing. Then it goes away. there’s no pattern to it.

Anki 24.06.3 (d678e393) (ao)
Python 3.9.18 Qt 6.6.2 PyQt 6.6.1
Platform: Windows-10-10.0.22631

===Add-ons (active)===
(add-on provided name [Add-on folder, installed at, version, is config changed])
AnkiConnect [‘2055492159’, 2024-07-25T21:55, ‘None’, ‘’]
FSRS Helper Postpone Advance Load Balance Easy Days Disperse Siblings [‘759844606’, 2024-10-09T19:36, ‘None’, mod]
Japanese Support [‘3918629684’, 2023-10-18T20:13, ‘None’, ‘’]
PassFail 2 Remove the Easy and Hard buttons [‘876946123’, 2024-06-03T18:56, ‘None’, ‘’]
Progress Graphs and Stats for Learned and Matured Cards [‘266436365’, 2020-03-28T23:26, ‘None’, ‘’]
Review Heatmap [‘1771074083’, 2022-06-29T18:43, ‘None’, ‘’]
True Retention [‘613684242’, 2019-12-05T21:03, ‘None’, ‘’]

===IDs of active AnkiWeb add-ons===
1771074083 2055492159 266436365 3918629684 613684242 759844606 876946123

===Add-ons (inactive)===
(add-on provided name [Add-on folder, installed at, version, is config changed])

4

I wanted to share a link to show what’s going on. This 60 second video shows me reviewing about 5 cards, with processing… popping up randomly between some of them.

This basically makes it impossible for me to do reviews efficiently. It throws off my tempo and distracts me.

Someone else asked something similar: Anki processing bar appear constantly after every card - #2 by Danika_Dakika and the only applicable answer for me would be “your pc may be busy doing other work” is there some way to diagnose or identify if this is the case?

https://www.reddit.com/r/medicalschoolanki/comments/191p95o/anki_23121_update_cards_lagging/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Anki/comments/195xw2y/anki_lag_issuestarted_today/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Anki/comments/19ehb30/anki_lag_after_updating/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Anki/comments/18u5gv7/anki_lagging_when_showing_front_andor_back_of/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Anki/comments/m7364k/anki_became_laggy/

here are some posts with other people experiencing a similar issue, all starting around the same time as when this started happening to me

7

I am providing one more datapoint: while making an offhanded comment about copying out of anki, I found that this is a consistently reproducible issue.

If I copy from Anki and paste into, say chrome, it will ALWAYS hang. The act of pushing “control-c” in Anki causes some sort of 3-5 second operation that lags the PC. Doing control C in chrome or any other program does not cause this.

I have no clue if this is related to the processing… issue – I get processing… even when I don’t control-c.
EDIT: I am almost 100% sure that this is the primary driver of the lag. I just attempted to do 100 reviews without touching anything but enter on my keyboard to flip and pass cards (or clicking again for fail with mouse) and got no “Processing…”. I think that anki may be doing something very weird whenever certain keyboard shortcuts are hit, in my case control-c which is one I do a lot while reviewing. I also do not observe the lag when I use right click->copy to copy.

I believe that the lag is being driven by certain keyboard strokes/combinations causing anki to perform some calculation action that is unnecessary. It’s possible that this is also creating some sort of leak or inefficiency if repeated over and over, which then slows down the program over time. But I cannot say for sure. All I know is right now, I’m not getting any processing… when I use only enter and my mouse.

EDIT 2: after doing roughly 150 reviews with the above method, processing happened twice in a row. then it did not continue happening. so I’m not sure. this is far less than usual, however. another data point to factor: the card that I got processing… on first to break the streak was a card I ended up failing, and when it came up for learning review, it did not lag. so its not the card itself.

8

Last post, sorry for repeated posts in a row. Things I’ve tried since my prior post:

  • Qt5 (no difference)
  • disable gsync (no difference)
  • update cpu and gpu drivers ( no difference)
9

Does the issue exist in the current release candidate in the beta testing section? Do you use third-party tools that monitor the clipboard?

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