I have 30,000+ cards and have issues with lag in the Mac OS desktop Anki app if I don’t reinstall Anki every few weeks. I am wondering if I could reduce that by removing media from some cards. Would removing media help to relieve lag from all cards (i.e. not the cards that actually have media on them)?
When does the lag occur? I have have about 20.000 cards with a lot of media as well and nothing is lagging on a 7 year old MacBook Pro with the latest Qt6 Anki version.
When I answer a note it will take 10+ seconds before the answer appears and again when it goes to the next one.
I would not expect reinstalling to make any difference to performance problems, as your collection data is not touched when you reinstall the app.
I’d be surprised if the amount of media files affected review performance. The only possibly-related thing there is if you have automatic media syncing on in the preferences screen, which you could try turning off - but it probably won’t make a difference.
Have you updated to the latest Anki and tried with all add-ons disabled? How much memory does your desktop have?
I successfully relieved the lag issue the last two times (about two weeks ago and about two months ago) by reinstalling using the same .dmg file I had from before, so the version was the same each time. I did this after reading on reddit that someone had relieved their lag issues by using the Qt5 version, so it is the Qt5 2.1.65 version. At first I thought that had been ‘the fix’ but after a month or so the lag was back and it turned out it was just the reinstall that had fixed it, not necessarily the change of version.
My computer is a 2022 MacBook with 16 GB memory.
Since I reinstalled fairly recently I don’t currently notice a significant lag. I posted now because I had a random thought that maybe all the media were what was causing the recurring problem, but it seems that’s not it. The only add-in I have been using is “Customize Keyboard Shortcuts” (24411424) and I unfortunately can’t live without it because I use PowerPoint clickers to do my flashcards and need that add-on to add “page up” and “page down” as good and again shortcuts. However I recall that before I found the reinstall solution on reddit I had tried disabling all add-ons and did not see any improvement in the lag.
Should I install the latest version (silicon version presumably rather than Qt5), or should I not so that I don’t ‘reset the timer’ regarding lag appearing a while after reinstalling so I can try turning off the media syncing and also disabling add-ons and see if that does anything?
I can’t think of a reason why reinstalling would help - that’s a bit of a mystery. If you’re not in a hurry to upgrade, maybe best to wait and see if/when it comes back again?
So it was getting pretty laggy again so I tried disabling the add-in and also the periodic media syncing… and the lag was gone. However, I then turned each one of them on again, and then all of them on again, and it was still gone. I’m wondering if maybe closing and reopening the app is what made it go away? Does lag accrue if you don’t quit the Anki app for too long? Not sure what’s going on.
Ah, that makes more sense. If you’re leaving the app running for weeks without closing it, and it’s slowing down, it sounds like a resource leak. The next time it happens, please check how much memory it’s consuming in activity monitor, and how much CPU usage it’s using when just sitting there.
Will do; thank you!
That’s not a huge amount of memory compared to Chrome. What are the memory stats at the bottom there? What sort of CPU usage do you see?
Ok, so it’s probably not memory related. The CPU usage should be visible on the CPU tab
My apologies - did not notice there were tabs. Since I already restarted the app I will wait a week and take a photo of that tab when it slows down again.
That doesn’t look out of the ordinary either unfortunately. Getting to the bottom of this might be tricky I’m afraid - for now I’d suggest just restarting Anki when it starts to become noticeable.
Yeah - given how easy that solution is, the problem really doesn’t seem important to me anymore.
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