imatch crashing and slow on my laptop

[stefanjan2]

Sorry to trouble you but imatch has become very slow and unstable on my laptop.

It has been working perfectly on my laptop while travelling but yesterday loading 43 CR3 images became very slow, never finished adding them to the dvtabase and then crashes.

I have tried running diagnostics (everything OK), rebooting, running imatch  without any other software but problem persists.

Attach a debug log, hope that indicates whats wrong.

[Mario]

A warning that the last session did not shut-down properly.
Did you kill IMatch in Task Manager before?
Windows crash?

A warning that several relocation sources were not found:

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Relocation source E:\Current Photos\ not found in database.
Relocation source E:\Redmi Camera\  not found in database.
Check your database portability settings.

No spell checker dictionary installed. No spell checking available anywhere in IMatch.

ExifTool needs about 5 seconds to extract metadata for 5 files. Over 400 tags per file, so this is normal.
No unusual exceptionally slow operations are logged.

Cache images for .CR2 files are created in ~ 1.2 seconds, which seems normal.

Cache files load in about 0.5 seconds.

Looks OK to me.

[stefanjan2]

I've deleted the portability options, run diagnostics, rebooted laptop but imatch is still incredibly slow in loading files and crashes. It's become unusable!

See screen grab attached. There are 43 files in the folder and it's only loaded 7% after 38 minutes and then crashed!

[stefanjan2]

Xnview has no issue displaying the files so I don't think that's the problem

[Mario]

The screen shot does not show a crash, IMatch ist just so busy with anything that it cannot respond within 2 seconds and Windows then displays this message. Use "Wait" to let IMatch continue.
I would like to see the log file from this very session.

The last log file you included shows perfectly normal operations. IMatch did not log any unusually slow operations that took longer than five seconds (except loading the database, which is normal).
CR3 files are loaded in a second. Cache files in 0.6 seconds. ExifTool performance normal.
Perfectly fine log file.

What did you do before this happened? You said it worked fine before, but now it has become so slow.
Did you install other software?
Changed IMatch options?
Which virus checker do you use?

Xnview has no issue displaying the file

Good for XNView. IMatch has also no problems indexing your CR3 files and creating cache images from them. Takes about a second each, plus 0.2 seconds for extracting metadata:

What exactly did you do when Windows displayed the message?

The progress bar in the bottom right corner gives an estimate of 38 minutes. Assuming it takes ~1.5 s to load a CR3 file (the timings from the last log file you have attached) and IMatch is processing ~16 files in parallel, this indicates that you have a lot of files to process.

You did not include the log file from this session, so we don't know if IMatch had to process 10 or 1000 files.

[stefanjan2]

Ok will try again later with debug logo on all night if necessary and see what happens.

I haven't added many files since it was stable but hopefully leaving it will fix it.

[stefanjan2]

I have tried a further test. Rebooted laptop, disabled all other software, set aeroplane mode, stopped virus checker (Microsoft Defender), Turned on debug logging, imatch completely up to date all files loaded.

Dragged 193 files from SD card into imatch. Took 4 hours 30 minutes to finish adding to database. Much of the time, imatch ws unusable, whenever I tried to do anything an hour glass appeared.

Debug log attached

Screen shots attached for 1 hour 47 minutes and 2 hours 13 minutes

[stefanjan2]

Further screen shots at 3 hours and 4 hours 23 minutes.

Prior to this test I have tried with a new imatch database but no different. All other software I tried in previous tests ran fine.

spec for my laptop here https://www.lenovo.com/gb/en/p/laptops/yoga/yoga-slim-series/yoga-slim-7-pro-x-gen-7-(14-inch-amd)/82tl009fuk

[Mario]

A screen shot of the Info & Activity panel would be helpful. Because that would show relevant info like how many images IMatch has to process.

I see entries like this in your log file:

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C:\Data\Photo Import Folder\Norway\AG8A6831.CR3 with 4640 x 6960 (O: 4660 x 6984) in 931875ms
931 (!) seconds to read a CR3 file. I don't know if you use Windows WIC (default) or LibRaw (photools.com RAW processing enabled). But the typical time for loading a CR3 file from a modern Canon body is about one second. Not 900s.
This will of course slow down IMatch to a crawl.

This looks like a virus checker badly interfering to me. I don't know how you "stopped" Windows Defender. I'm not even sure that's possible.

Make exceptions for the IMatch executable

C:\Program Files\photools.com\imatch6\IMatch2023x64.exe

and the ExifTool version shipped with IMatch:

C:\Program Files\photools.com\imatch6\exiftool.exe

The only other way would be that you are using WIC and the WIC codec provided by Microsoft chokes very badly on the proprietary Canon RAW files you use. This hasn't happen for years, but who knows...

Go to Edit > Preference > Application.
Search for the word raw
Set Prefer photools.com RAW processing to yes.
IMatch now uses LibRaw. Maybe it handles these CR3 files faster.

You can also run a WIC diagnosis for the file I've mentioned above on your PC.
Select the file in a File Window.
Run Help menu > Support > WIC Diagnostics
Attach the result.

And you can send me this file to support email address
I can add it to a database here and see if this also takes 900 seconds.
If not, we know it's something isolated on you PC, like the virus checker or maybe a "broken" WIC installation or something.

[mopperle]

Not sure if this is relevant. The file prefix says .cr3, which points to a Canon RAW file, But the icon shows DxO Photolab. Have you assigned the cr3 files to DxO?

[stefanjan2]

Not sure if this is relevant. The file prefix says .cr3, which points to a Canon RAW file, But the icon shows DxO Photolab. Have you assigned the cr3 files to DxO?

Yes CR3 asssigned to Photolab. But I'm sure that's not relevant.

[stefanjan2]

Mario, thanks for investigating this.

I implemented the changes you suggested and then imported around 300 files. Took a few minutes to load but then everything seems to be working correctly.

Hopefully the problem has been resolved by the changes you suggested.

Thanks again