Question: TDL seems unreasonably slow when opening multiple task lists.

[Fitnerd]

Hi Dan!

I run several instances of TDL, and each instance has several (5-8) Task Lists open. I use:

C:\Tools\ToDoList\ToDoList.exe "D:\Tasks\TaskList1.tdl" -i "D:\Tasks\SpecializedIni.ini" -f "D:\Tasks\TaskList2.tdl|D:\Tasks\TaskList3.tdl|D:\Tasks\TaskList4.tdl" -z

to accomplish this. I have enabled delayed loading of task lists.

My tasklists are not very large: 100Kb-2Mb in size, and on the order of 100-1000 tasks each.

Yet, it takes around 20-50 seconds to load the program with all the task lists (only first task lists is loaded, others are delay-loaded). On a modern desktop with SSD, Core i5 from 2018 it seems rather slow. I have no idea what makes it slow, perhaps the fact that I have all task views enabled by default (however shouldn't it be the case that only the active view is loaded at first).

Any help would be appreciated!

Thank you.

[.dan.g.]

Can you add '-g' to the commandline to enable logging and then re-run the experiment, after which please attaching the log file?

[Fitnerd]

Hi Dan!

Thank you for looking into this.

I have attached the log file as requested, as well as the ini file I tried for this particular experiment. I cleaned up ini file of all the TaskList-specific settings, and THEN ran TDL. However that made no difference in terms of speed: on average each file took around 7 seconds to load (there were a total of 7 task lists - each with 50-150 tasks 50KB-150KB in size (so pretty small lists).

Thank you.

[TonyG]

Personally I've accepted the performance of TDL, and separate lists into different instances of TDL. Each instance on its own only takes a couple seconds to load.

Go to Preferences>General>Allow multiple instances of ToDoList.

You can reduce the size of the .tdl file by linking to attachments rather than adding them in-line.

If you find comments are getting too big, that's another opportunity to link elsewhere. A simple click on the File Link will open external files.

I understand that this isn't always desirable. I need a lot of text in some lists too.

Yet another way to break down the size is to break a single list into more than one. Some of my client tasks are completely unrelated so I create separate lists.

And another way is to archive tasks ... because it's likely that something that we worked on 6-12 months ago doesn't absolutely need to be in the same list with live tasks.

HTH

[Fitnerd]

Thank you for your suggestions!

I already do some of that. In fact I have 5 TDL instances already, and each instance deals with 5 to 10 task lists. Having just 1 instance per task list is an absolute overkill, as that would mean at least 30 TDL processes running. I segregate TDL into different instances based on the preferences that should be shared between task lists opened inside each instance. Also, for me, the time to start tdl and load even one task list is about 10 seconds, not 2 (and that with a small task list).