alkmai

Q: Notes slow

I'm trying out Apple Notes, migrating a few thousand notes from Evernote and find that the speed is fairly horrific, with multi-second pauses on scrolling whilst using the app on the iPhone 6S or iPad Pro, and still noticeable pauses on a MacBook Pro Retina 2.7GHz machine. Evernote running on all the devices is perfectly acceptable - whether the file is synced locally or not.

 

iPhone 6S Plus has 128GB with tens of GB free.

iPad Pro also has 128GB with tens of GB free.

MacBook Pro Retina 15" has 16GB RAM, 2.7GHz processor and 768GB SDD.

Number of notes ~4,000 including many with PDFs attached.

 

Is it just me experiencing this slowness?

iPhone 6s Plus, iOS 9.3

Posted on Mar 27, 2016 11:37 AM

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Q: Notes slow

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  • by walk0080,

    walk0080 walk0080 Jul 15, 2016 7:14 AM in response to walk0080
    Level 1 (29 points)
    Desktops
    Jul 15, 2016 7:14 AM in response to walk0080

    Sadly this backup/restore process only worked for a week or two.

     

    Back to slowness again. Strongly suspect an iCloud issue here as when I had the 1,500 notes stored locally on my iMac, everything was very fast and smooth.

  • by Adiel_G,

    Adiel_G Adiel_G Jul 15, 2016 7:16 AM in response to walk0080
    Level 1 (14 points)
    Jul 15, 2016 7:16 AM in response to walk0080

    That's what I'm saying. You shouldn't restore. Otherwise you'll back in the state you were before. There's no fix yet so why would you even try.

  • by walk0080,

    walk0080 walk0080 Jul 15, 2016 7:37 AM in response to alkmai
    Level 1 (29 points)
    Desktops
    Jul 15, 2016 7:37 AM in response to alkmai

    I chatted with Apple Support today.

     

    The agent said seems to be an issue with large number of Notes and iCloud sync. He didn't have me fiddle with settings or anything based on the info I gave him. He was going to "forward my concern to his supervisor to provide feedback" to the iCloud team. Maybe if enough people complain to support it will be included in a future version (or maybe they are already working on it - one can only hope).

     

    In the meantime I'll stick with a laggy Notes app. I don't really want to switch back to Evernote again.

  • by walk0080,

    walk0080 walk0080 Jul 30, 2016 8:29 AM in response to alkmai
    Level 1 (29 points)
    Desktops
    Jul 30, 2016 8:29 AM in response to alkmai

    OK so what I ended up doing was moving a large number of Notes (recipes) to a recipe management software. Then I moved another large number of Notes that are more reference-style material to my local iMac taking them out of iCloud.

     

    That left me with 170 Notes that I access frequently, but I found that the slowness continued. Checking iCloud usage, the space used by Notes dropped from 1.1GB down to 500MB. There was no reason for the continued 500MB iCloud storage usage for such a small number of notes - seemed like a lot of garbage left behind in iCloud. The following final steps sped up Notes removing the laggy behaviour with iCloud - should keep me going until a fix is implemented:

     

    1. Moved remaining 170 Notes in iCloud to a temporary Notes folder on my iMac.

    2. Ensured that Notes were synced and cleared out on all my other devices.

    3. Went to iCloud storage managemet and deleted all Notes data.

    4. Let things sit as is. I left it alone until next morning. Probably only need a few minutes of waiting.

    5. Copied the 170 Notes back to iCloud.

    6. Allowed other devices to sync (this took a long time - some devices took 30 min before the sync process would start)

    7. Went back to iCloud storage and Notes was then only using 65MB.

  • by llllloyd,

    llllloyd llllloyd Sep 1, 2016 7:17 AM in response to Adiel_G
    Level 1 (4 points)
    iPhone
    Sep 1, 2016 7:17 AM in response to Adiel_G

    Thanks so much, finally fixed the issue!

  • by kgeter,

    kgeter kgeter Sep 19, 2016 10:53 AM in response to walk0080
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Sep 19, 2016 10:53 AM in response to walk0080

    Option B worked fine for me. Thanks for writing up the instructions.

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