FoxTrot Pro 6.6.3 (built 1988) installation slows down all of our Macs and even the network when opening the index-file

[Sascha Ballweg]

Hi, I need some help, please! Our FoxTrot Pro 6.6.3 (built 1988) installation slows down all of our Macs and even the internal network and the web-access, when opening the index-file.

The problem has been around for about half a year (maybe longer or shorter because time is flying by these days).

The index has a size of 3,1 GB and there are 718 GB free on my HD.

The location of the index is local > library > FoxTrot

iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2017) 3,4 GHz Intel Core i5

MacOS Mojave 10.14.6 (18G103)

I start FoxTrot via the app "DelayedLauncher" with a delay of 300 seconds after the last autostart app.

For the settings please take a look at the attachements...

 

[Foxtrot Engineering]

> Sascha Ballweg wrote:
>
> Hi, I need some help, please! Our FoxTrot Pro 6.6.3 (built 1988) installation slows down all of our Macs and even the internal network and the web-access, when opening the index-file.

It seems your WorkMirror drive is a network volume, which may be the cause of this slowness, depending of the speed of your access to this volume. If this volume is a shared folder folder from another Mac, one solution would be to use the index sharing functionality of FoxTrot Pro 5-user, so the index will be built and updated on your distant machine, instead of through the network.

You may also consider creating multiple index files, and having different schedules for those: a frequent schedule for the index containing local files that are updated frequently, and a less frequent one (or no schedule at all) for your WorkMirror drive, or for large files you update less frequently.


You have a schedule to update your index at 12:10 PM, which should be executed if your Mac is not in sleep mode at this time, even if FoxTrot is not launched. If your Mac was powered off at the specified time, the missed schedule will not be executed; if it was in sleep mode at the specified time, the update will be executed when waking up the machine (even if the application is not launched).

In your screenshot, your last updated ended yesterday at 12:47, so I think it should have no reason to update today at 11:25; did you manually update your index? Was your Mac shut down, or sleeping, or logged to a different macOS user account, before you launched FoxTrot this morning?

Indexing slows down your machine, especially if you have a hard drive and no SSD, but it should remain usable. This can however depend on many factors (size of the index, number of files that have been modified, size and type of these files, and of course, network drives may be very slow, depending of your network and of the location of this drive…).

Jérôme - Foxtrot Engineering

[Sascha Ballweg]

Thank you very much for your answer! To make a long story short: Everything worked fine until about 6 months ago.

Some answers; Yes our "WorkMirror" drive is a network volume. On this volume we store all our work in the first place, which should not be unusual in a small team environment.

"WorkMirror" is a Synology NAS Volume and it is not underpowered, based on the indicator within its Admin-Panel. We only create smaller files and not so many of them.

I I have a SSD but will create different schedules for the local and the network-volume. But as I already told you;
the network-volume is the one all work is done onto and FoxTrot is therefore not the right product to do the job on a network volume?

It would be great if FoxTrot would recognize and store saves and changes made in realtime, so the indexing would only run for maintenance reasons, from time to time. 

But it's not long ago, that all went fine.
So my guess is, that the problems are within the code of FoxTrot. 

Kind regards, Sascha 

[FoxTrot Engineering]

Sascha Ballweg wrote:

>"WorkMirror" is a Synology NAS Volume and it is not underpowered

>the network-volume is the one all work is done onto and FoxTrot is
>therefore not the right product to do the job on a network volume?

FoxTrot is of course the right product to do the job on a network volume, as long as the speed and responsiveness of your network is in adequacy with the number and size of the files stored on it, and with the frequency they are updated.

As you report some slowness on your internal network and the web-access, I would suspect a not so fast local network. If you access this drive through Wi-Fi, I would certainly start by checking its actual performance.


Jérôme - FoxTrot Engineering

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