Why is Calibre sooo slow?

[svsilentsun]

Am I the only person for whom Calibre takes FOREVER to start up?! It takes a full 7 minutes (I timed it) for it to fully start, and during that time I can't do a thing on the computer. Is it a problem w/my computer or is it just a Calibre thing? It's so frustrating it's seriously making me consider just deleting it. BTW, I'm working on a 3-yr old laptop w/Vista. Thoughts?

[Linjeakel]

I use calibre on a year old laptop with Vista. It does take a lot longer than any other program to open, but it's nothing like seven minutes on mine. I guess it depends on the spec of your laptop and quite possibly on the number of books you have in your calibre library.

[nogdog~6op6ou]

Have you upgraded to the latest version? It claims to be faster starting up now -- at least after the first start-up, as it supposedly now caches a lot of the data it used to have to read from all the saved books each time. It's still slow, but not 7 minutes slow on mine. (Mind you, I don't use it to manage a large library of books, just the occasional conversion from one format to another more Kindle-friendly format.)

Other than that, what amount of RAM are you working with on your 'puter? If it's not running at least 2GB, that can be one of the cheapest/quickest ways to boost performance of a Windoze machine, so that there is less disk-swapping of virtual memory.

[sebat]

I'm with Nog.  I think you need a RAM update.

I'm using Calibre only for metadata changes and to store books purchased from places other than Amazon.  I currently have 123 books stored in it.  I just timed it, calibre only took 6 seconds to open on my system.  I'm running the newest version of the program and have 4GB of RAM.

[Carol Collett]

I have the latest Calibre edition on my netbook running XP with 1GB RAM and it opens within seconds. I have around 200 books in the Calibre library. I haven't had a problem with other applications slowing down while opening Calibre either.

[HappyGuy]

I have over 871 books in Calibre now, and it takes about 20 - 30 seconds to open. Yep, sounds like you need to get to Best Buy and get a memory upgrade.

[Guido Henkel]

You need to get a Mac. Everything on a PC takes forever, while things just breeze through on a Mac.

[nogdog~6op6ou]

You need to get a Mac. Everything on a PC takes forever, while things just breeze through on a Mac.

Sure, give me the extra $1k it would take for me to buy a Mac with equivalent performance to my (refurbbed) HP Winblows notebook or my Linux desktop, and I'll be glad to take you up on that. Actually, that's a lie: I've used Windoze for so long that I don't find the Mac GUI comfortable (and I always change the newest Windows GUI's to the "classic" interface).

Really, Macs are fine, and you almost get what you pay for, but a properly set up Windows machine of about 2/3 the price (or less) will perform just as well. The problem is that since Windows is an open platform (as opposed to Apple's tightly controlled closed platform), the unwary user can slow/bloat a Windows machine with bad software, poor peripheral compatibility, etc.; in which case such a user might be better off spending the extra bucks on a Mac.

Me, I'm running just fine on my little Windows notebook, even with Apache and MySQL running in the background at all times.

[svsilentsun]

Thanks for the suggestions on RAM. That's likely the culprit. I'm at work and have no idea what kind of RAM that pathetic machine has but suspect it's about 64 mb - LOL!

ETA: I'm kidding, of course.

[mrscottishman]

It is slow because it is calibre.  Calibre means slow in the swahaanon language.  It is just a resource hog with parallel programs opening.  I have 2 gig on an XP machine and I usually make a sandwich while it is doing something.

But there is nothing like it, so it is the best,
Scott