Why is Epyrus sometimes freezing mid-usage

[jb_wisemo]

Back in the announcement thread I mentioned my hope that Epyrus would not randomly freeze like Interlink used to do. However, unfortunately this does happen with Epyrus 2.0.0 on Windows 8 (x86_64).

The symptom is that while doing seemingly normal things like typing in the contents of an e-mail or navigating around the mail folders of various accounts, the UI suddenly stops responding to keystrokes, and after a few moments, Windows itself detects that Epyrus has stopped checking for new input and Appends "Not Responding" to the title bar. After a few minutes of using other programs for other tasks, Epyrus returns to polling for keyboard and mouse input (running the Windows Message Loop), and continues where it left off. But the problem may reappear some minutes later in the same run of Epyrus.

I have no known way of debugging, but I suspect that some background network operation is being run as blocking calls in the foreground (UI) thread, thus freezing the UI every time it happens during user input.

My configuration uses IMAP and NNTP with a lot of folders. IMAP is a site local dovecot server. The NNTP server is news.giganews.com.

[back2themoon]

Have you checked with your security software and added exclusions for Epyrus? Since it's not a "popular" process, it's a prime target for aggressive behaviour from A/V's (Defender included).

[Bilbo47]

The slowdowns / temporary UI freezes (a few seconds at most) I have noticed from Epyrus usually happen immediately after deleting several messages. We would expect a background process to update the index file global-messages-db.sqlite at that time. However my file is 64MB, so I assume the delay has something to do with the large number (greater than one) of messages being updated all at the same time within the rather large index file.

Also have noticed a few general crashes per week, in context of keeping the program open all day, and closing it only when putting Windows to sleep for the night. These often happen when Epyrus does not have focus :/

[Moonchild]

I have Epyrus open pretty much 24/7 and have not experience any issues with it.
I also have huge mailboxes, and often delete many messages at once or in rapid succession. The only short (1 second or less) pauses I experience are expected when I e.g. move or archive a batch of messages. My GLODA message search index is 182 MB at the moment. No issues there...

If the search index is what you think is the problem then you could try rebuilding it from your mailboxes from a blank slate.

1. Quit Epyrus.
2. Locate the global-messages-db.sqlite file in your Epyrus user profile.
3. Delete the global-messages-db.sqlite file.
4. Start Epyrus. The re-indexing process will start automatically. Depending on the number of messages, it might take some time for the indexing to complete. You can continue to use Epyrus, but performance might be affected and search will return only partial results or even no results until the indexing is complete.

The indexing progress can be monitored through the Tools > Activity Manager menu.

You may also want to check rebuilding folder indices if there's a specific mailbox/folder that causes issues.
Right-click a mailbox, select Properties, then click the "Repair folder" button