4.4 froze hard during database conversion

[Bill_Texas]

Just installed 4.4 and ran it. I adore poppeeper, and it's truly great, but am reporting an issue on just the latest version.

I have a hotmail account with over 16,000 that hung on the database conversion step, and it truly looked hopeless. I know you prefer that users just wait it out but I don't believe further waiting would have helped after at least 10 minutes of 0% CPU, so I terminated the process. FYI that was the 9th account out of 19.

Then I started it again, everything seems to run okay in all accounts (even those that presumably were not converted). What should I do, just reinstall, and give it an hour this time (because of the hang on the huge account)?

BTW TaskInfo reports a current version of 4.3.0.0 though help/about says 4.4 and \Program File\Pop Peeper\ does have the new .EXE.

And Just for the sake of trivia or your interest, the 16,000 message account now takes 4 minutes to load on a slightly old but Pentium box. That's about the same as 4.3 took. (Accounts with under 500 or 1,000 work fast.)

[mjs]

.... And Just for the sake of trivia or your interest, the 16,000 message account now takes 4 minutes to load on a slightly old but Pentium box. That's about the same as 4.3 took. (Accounts with under 500 or 1,000 work fast.)

Take a look at this post by Jeff regarding the expected load time for v4.4: http://www.esumsoft.com/Forums/viewtopi ... 2nd#p34459. Specific to load time for v4.4:

... you may not notice the difference until the 3rd run because on the 2nd run, it will do maintenance on the databases (cleaning up from the upgrade).

[Bill_Texas]

(Grrr, I'm not getting email notification of replies.) Sorry, let me CORRECT my post. I was giving "CHECK MAIL" time, not load time. Equivalently, I observe that to be the same amount of amount of time when deleting a message.

I'm finding that both 4.3 and 4.4 take about 15 seconds per 1,000 messages on this machine (which Speedtest says downloads at 40 Mbps)

[Jeff]

If everything appears to be working, let's not worry about it *too* much. However, it is possible that there's some data corruption in the account that was being processed. What I would suggest is that you try opening some messages at random, be sure to open some of the more recent ones, ones in the middle, and ones at the bottom.


Load time (just saw your update) -- This update was specifically for the amount of time that PP takes to start (ie. load your existing messages from disk), not checking your email. Is your 16K-message account using webmail (ie. server type = hotmail/outlook)? In general, IMAP will be much faster/efficient than webmail. The largest imap account I have has 2K messages and it takes less than 1s to complete (not counting login time). That being said, with the unreliability of Hotmail's Imap servers (even though they're working well enough now), I'm not necessarily suggesting that you change... fwiw, webmail is also more cpu-intensive than imap so you may see a significant difference. What you could do, if you're so inclined, is to create a duplicate account using imap and have both webmail and imap run side-by-side for a comparison.

[Bill_Texas]

Hmm still not getting emails for forum replies (yes, I confirmed the sticky note items). I tested numerous messages in the big account and so far they seem okay.

Presumably several accounts were converted, one is possibly "in flux", and the rest of the accounts are unconverted; I assume that's okay, just losing the speed improvement? I don't mind starting over, though I really expect it to hang again.

Thank you for bringing up the IMAP possibility. I'm ignorant about IMAP but can report that under the account options Advanced 2 I have IMAP checked. This is not the Pro version FYI. General options/message retrieval has headers, headers, headers, 0 POP3/IMAP message limit, and none of the webmail checkboxes checked. For Plugins all 5 are checked; Webmail, IMAP, and SendMail start with 4.4

[Jeff]

Check any spam filters (including at your email service) for missing reply notifications.

There's a chance that all the other databases were converted successfully -- PP may have converted the subsequent accounts on the next restart and you didn't even notice (it's generally fast for small accounts); in fact, it may have even continued to update the one in question. Corruption may have other issues than just losing the benefit of speed, including random crashes (e.g. it may crash when you try to open a particular message, some messages may be garbled, etc.). Unless you have a backup of the database, it's not possible to start over. Again, as long as it loads, it's probably not that big of a deal.

To check if the account is using IMAP or something else: edit the account and refer to the "server type" on the "General" page. You said it was hotmail, so the potential candidates are: IMAP, POP3 or Hotmail/Outlook.

[Bill_Texas]

>> Check any spam filters
Forgive me, I almost never have legit. messages marked as spam but hotmail slammed all of your forum messages into junk. I'm an idiot for not checking that first, and I'm an idiot for you having to tell me, but thank you. And thanks for your restraint at such a dumb oversight.

>> To check if the account is using IMAP
Wow, I told you everything about IMAP but the one that mattered! Okay, server type says Hotmail/Outlook. After this, I'll change that [EDIT: rather, add that as a parallel account] on your recommendation, unless you suggest something else.

>> PP may have converted the subsequent accounts
There are all 19 folders in ...\application data\POP Peeper with today's date, and data.db with today's date in each (plus another older file like data.db~VRHV9... or such in all but a couple of the folders). The older files are from one date in 2015 so I guess that's my latest backup (embarrassed face).

(Regarding the hang and the unfortunate termination of process midstream):
Note, prior to the upgrade, once per week or two I would have to terminate the process because it went "not responding" and 0% CPU for 10+ minutes during an operation like deleting a message. I'm just saying, it might not necessarily have hung due to the conversion size. At any rate, from the looks of the progress bar, I project that it was going to need 10 or 20 minutes to convert the big account, but it hung before it got there.

Given that possibility that maybe it hung for another reason, maybe I should just add another account for that hotmail account and let it rebuild itself. Otherwise I can just continue along as you suggest as long as there's no problem, and only do that as a last resort.

Thank you for your generous attention to this.

[Jeff]

hotmail slammed all of your forum messages into junk. I'm an idiot for not checking that first

Don't worry, you're not the first This is a good example of why I don't like server-side filters, though, and prefer client-side.

Okay, server type says Hotmail/Outlook. After this, I'll change that on your recommendation, unless you suggest something else.

What you could do is to create a duplicate account using imap and have both webmail and imap run side-by-side for a comparison. That way, if there's little to no difference, you can just delete the imap account and not worry about it. If you do prefer imap, you may want to edit your original account as all your sent/archived/saved messages are tied to that account.

At any rate, from the looks of the progress bar, I project that it was going to need 10 or 20 minutes to convert the big account, but it hung before it got there.

Actually, that's pretty typical. Basically, a lot of the work is cached, and then at the end of the process, the cache is written to the database. The result is that the overall process takes significantly less time, but at the point when the DB is being written to, it makes PP appear unresponsive and 16K messages would take a while to save the cached transaction.

Given that possibility that maybe it hung for another reason, maybe I should just add another account for that hotmail account and let it rebuild itself.

That may be the "better safe than sorry" approach. Go ahead and create the duplicate imap account and if it works better, let me know and I'll provide my recommendation for how to merge the accounts.