Some cards with large pictures slow in 2.1.28

Hi, on the new version of desktop anki (2.1.28), I’m having trouble with some cards with large images or many images on them. It loads the text and then takes about 1-2 seconds to load the images.

My laptop is a dell xps 9570. I’ve tried with battery and plugged in mode. I’ve also tried with using the integrated gpu and forcing the gaming gpu. I’ve also tried toggling the hardware acceleration option.

I’ve disabled all add-ons and it’s the same thing.

If I go back to 2.1.26, everything works just fine and images are loading quickly.

Please try the older download available on the following page, and let me know if the image issue exists in it.

https://apps.ankiweb.net/downloads/beta/

@addons_zz this may be a regression caused by the media server changes

I just tried older-anki-2.1.28beta1-4d23a69e-windows.exe

same issue. The images have a slightly longer delay in the .28 build. Whereas the .26 loads much faster.

I also tried beta .29 just to see, same thing in that.

I could look into configuring the waitress backend to use more CPU cores (if it does not do this already) and to use a bigger chunk size when serving files. If I remember correctly, the old backend just served the files all at once, i.e., without chucking them into peaces as flask is probably doing now. Then, increasing these chunk sizes to bigger value should cause the same behavior as the old server.

@rappa

  1. How much large are those images? i.e., 10 MB each?
  2. How much images are many images? 100 images? What is the average size of each one of them?

Can you share a card where this problem happens (so I can reproduce it locally) while trying to fix it?

If beta1 has the same issues, please try downloading 2.1.29-beta1-alternate - it uses an older toolkit version, which may help.

By large, i meant more as the resolution. For example one of the images is 710kb, dimensions are 6603x2160. And the one’s with many images are around 4-5 images on one card.

Here’s a test card: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zdk3woj3o45SPSONXaAq9LkQ19Pk1MwN/view?usp=sharing

I’ll try to upload a video too. It might just be a problem on certain systems/gpu’s too…

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The alternate works well, just like .26.

The alternate one works kind of like the older anki versions used to work. When I installed that, the font size of everything got much larger. Previously i had to set it to 120% because everything got smaller after one of the versions somewhere around after 2.1.10 or something. So I suppose the “alternate” version is very different.

Glad to hear the alternate version has fixed it. Sadly this is a common occurrence - each toolkit update tends to fix some things and break others.

@addons_zz sorry for the false alarm :slight_smile:

Ya, I don’t know too much about the technical side of things. But as I’ve been testing for the last 30 or so minutes, I’m also getting some black boxes and bars with the .28 version. That reminds me of some issues that used to happen to me in the really old builds. Which makes it look like some gpu problem. Although the laptop is fairly new, from 2018 and I’ve tried both integrated and dedicated graphics for anki.

Perhaps you’ll have more luck with angle. https://changes.ankiweb.net/#/known-issues

I tried that. Getting similar results. Thanks for trying. I guess I’ll stick with the alternate .28 or the regular .26 and keep trying as new versions are released.

Would you mind trying 2.1.29beta2 and letting us know if it helps?

Just tried out 2.1.29 beta 2 and it works perfect like .26!

Great, thanks for letting me know.