RedNotebook hangs

[Jani Valtari]

I have been useing RedNotebook for 9 months now, making some notes almost every day. It has been working fine, but it started hanging all of a sudden after I installed latest version 1.10.2. Seems to happen at the point when it is auto-saving my writing to text files. And after it hangs, I am not able to start it anymore - if I shut it down and try to restart, it just hangs immediately again. The only way to get rednotebook running again is to manually open the text file what it saved last, and then manually remove the latest entry. After that I am again able to start RedNotebook again.

So it seems to me, that RedNotebook saves something corrupt to the text file, and then hangs. The file looks perfectly fine to me ( if I open it e.g. via Notepad++). I just need to manually remove the last entry. If I then copy-past the exact same deleted content on the RedNotebook UI (and remove all the extra escape characters what RedNotebook stores to text files). It is still fine. So the issue does not seem to be in the actual text content itself, but something else corrupts the file...

I use Windows 7 Enterprice as OS.

[Jendrik Seipp (jendrikseipp)]

Thanks for the report! Can you check that your disk isn't full, please?

Does the error happen with any kind of text, or does it have to contain
specific words?

[Jani Valtari (jani-valtari)]

My HD is not full, there is some 8GB free.

Now this hanging just happened, when I only inserted my meeting template to a new day (so no special words) and just waited for the first auto-saving to happen. Would sending sending the txt-file help in this?

[Jendrik Seipp (jendrikseipp)]

Opening the file works for me on Linux. Could you please try to reproduce the bug and then post the logfile from C:\Users\.rednotebook?

[Jani Valtari (jani-valtari)]

here is the log?field.comment=here is the log

[Jendrik Seipp (jendrikseipp)]

In the logfile everything seems to work. Can you make sure that you post
a logfile where the error occured, e.g. by deleting the logfile before
starting RedNotebook?

[Jani Valtari (jani-valtari)]

it does look a bit weird... I tried this several times. Using the text file which causes hanging, then using an empty 2015-10.txt file which does not cause hanging. Then again the original file which causes hanging. The log file looks identical in both cases, so the startup sequence goes till the end in both cases...

[Jani Valtari (jani-valtari)]

The word cloud is not shown when it hangs. Although the log claims that 'Cloud is updated', it is anyhow not shown in the UI

[Jendrik Seipp (jendrikseipp)]

OK, thanks! I'll try to reproduce this on Windows.

[Jani Valtari (jani-valtari)]

Is there a way to remove tags and cloud words from the UI? It could help to try out so, that UI does not try to show those texts at all

[Jani Valtari (jani-valtari)]

I have a corporate laptop with all kinds of background SW, and it is possible that there is some auto-installed SW which is causing these issues etc...

[Jendrik Seipp (jendrikseipp)]

You could try to add the regular expression ".*" (without asterisks) to
the cloud ignore list in the preferences, but I doubt it'll make a
difference.

[Jani Valtari (jani-valtari)]

Thanks, actually that helped! Now I was also able to open the file which caused hanging earlier, but it does not cause it anymore. I have been using RedNotebook now for few hours, and it has been also auto-saving without issues. So looks like the problem is solved.

I do not really use the word cloud for anything, so I am fine with current work-around of having ".*" in the cloud ignore list.

Could this be something related to hitting some limits with the amount of analysed text for cloud part? Perhaps there could be some words with are always in my meeting template file (and appearing very often), but not excluded in the cloud analysis, so there might be multiple words which appear very often... My notes from past 9 months are around 192kB.

[Jendrik Seipp (jendrikseipp)]

Thanks to your investigations, I found that the regular expression for
parsing hashtags was unnecessarily complex. After making it simpler,
hashtags are now parsed up to 1000 times faster (e.g. on input that
doesn't contain alphanumeric characters). I don't know if that could
have been part of the error you were seeing, though.

[Jani Valtari (jani-valtari)]

Good to know, I continue now with ".*" in the ignore list. I guess your improvement will come to the next release, so I can do some re-testing then.