Random long delay when starting up UltraEdit

[marstech]

I randomly experience slow startups of UltraEdit at times. It’s like a short pause. I’m almost certain it doesn’t access hard drive during the gap. I have used UltraEdit since at least version 10 or something I think, maybe longer. I have never had this issue until recently. I think it come about during 17. It’s like a 6 second pause before launch. Most launches are instance. At one time I thought it had something to do with my 3rd hard drive going to sleep, but I have since tested that and found that not to be the case. I have crawled through all the options that I thought might affect the startup and still no luck. At the moment I primarily use UltraEdit to open text files from a right-click context menu in Explorer or to make a quick note on my desktop. It happens when I just launch the application with a blank document as well. The delay makes it extremely frustrating to use as my default text editor. This has to be an issue with an UltraEdit option as nothing on my system takes that long to load. Photoshop CS5 loads in like 4 seconds. Has anyone experienced this issue and perhaps resolved it?

[Mofi]

There are already following topics about slow startup (from newest to oldest):

Slow down when editing large files with Real-Time Protection Software
UltraEdit Fast Startup
UltraEdit is getting very slow
Startup Speed

I have not read all those topics now again, but if I remember correct a 6 seconds delay is either caused by using by default a network printer not always available - turn off Load/restore printer settings at Avanced - Configuration - Editor - Advanced, or by FTP account settings not correct converted from previous to new format, or by an anti-virus application. Because you don't see any disk access while this 6 seconds delay, I suppose that this delay is a network access delay.

I suggest to read all the topics carefully, evaluate which of the reasons or suggestions could be helpful on your problem and apply them.

If finally none has helped, you can use free Process Monitor from SysInternals (Microsoft) to find out who causes the delay to log entire startup process and look where is the delay and which process cause it and perhaps also why.

[marstech]

Thanks for your reply. I have seen and gone through the posts you mentioned. I did miss the FTP thing you mention though. I have my ftp settings set to store under ftp.ini on a second drive. Would deleting that file be enough to test to see if that is the problem?

I suggest to just rename the file with the FTP account settings to test if the FTP account settings format is the problem.

Unfortunately deleting the ftp.ini file didn't help. Using Process Monitor seems like a great idea. The randomness made it a little hard but I did get a log of the delayed launch with Process Monitor. I haven’t used that before and nothing is really standing out for me that could be a problem. Is that something you could examine and divulged any info from?

[Mofi]

Well, examing a Process Monitor log is not easy and time consuming due to the thousands of log entries. Often filters can be used to avoid the need to look on thousands of lines, but not in this case. I suggest that you look on the time column of all the entries to find the operations needing long time. By default just the column Time of Day is visible. But you definitely don't want to calculate the time difference by yourself.

Therefore click with right mouse button on the header of the columns and click on Select Columns... or use Options - Select Columns.... Enable the column Duration and perhaps disable Time of Day column. After closing the dialog the Duration column is the most right column. Move it by drag and drop to left, for example as second column after the column with the sequence numbers.

Now it would be good to use File - Save and save the log as CSV file. Open the CSV file (with tab character as delimiter) in a spreadsheet application like Microsoft Excel and sort the lines based on duration column. Which operations need much longer as the others? Normally operations need less than 1 millisecond. The operations which need long are the most interesting now.

[marstech]

This one looks suspicious.

Process Name: Uedit32.exe
Date & Time: 7/23/2011 12:28:34 PM
Event Class: File System
Operation: DeviceIoControl
Result: SUCCESS
Path: \Device\Harddisk2\DR2
TID: 632
Duration: 6.6432115
Control: SMART_GET_VERSION

I'm guessing that is my third hard drive. I dunno why UltraEdit would be looking at anything on it though.

[Mofi]

Okay, it looks like you have found the operation responsible for the 6 seconds delay. Now the question is why this operation is executed at all.

1) A file was recently opened from third hard disk.

Perhaps you have had opened once a file from your third hard disk and the complete name of the file is still listed in File - Recent Files. Two weeks ago I have made also a Process Monitor log of UE startup by searching for something other and encountered on looking of this log that UltraEdit reads in entire directory structure for all files listed in recent file list which are located on local drives. The recent files on network drives are ignored. This happens on a very early stage on startup and I contributed to my report that I think this is not done by program code of UltraEdit itself, but by Microsoft's GDIPlus or MDI library which manages the recent file list. I could strengthen my assumption in the meantime because I can see the same behavior in log of Process Monitor on startup of Word 2007 which uses also GDIPlus and MDI libraries. So the IDM developers perhaps can't do much against this behavior.

The possible solutions for solving this problem are:

1. Clicking on a file in the recent file list not yet available. That results in showing an error message and then the entry is removed from the recent file list.
2. Using the button Clear History in configuration dialog Toolbars / Menus - Miscellaneous which clears (nearly) all histories including the recent file list.
3. Enabling option Clear recent document/project and search/replace histories on exit in configuration dialog Toolbars / Menus - Miscellaneous which (nearly) no history should be recorded at all. Please note that with using this setting the option Reload files previously open on startup can't work anymore.
4. Change the Number of recent files on file menu in configuration dialog Toolbars / Menus - Miscellaneous to 1, close the configuration dialog with OK, restart UE and set the value back to preferred number of recent files to temporarily clear just the recent file list (except for last file).

2) Your third hard drive is still a mounted drive in Windows.

Windows remembers every storage driver ever mounted in MountedDevices and MountPoints2 registry keys. This is no problem for the drives which are permanently available. For network drives which are mounted with "reconnect" option enabled (default) this is already a problem if the server with the share(s) is not always available. For local drives which are not permanently available this can be problematic. Usually Windows does not try to remount local storage drives not yet available like USB sticks or USB hard disks. But it is possible that on bad disconnection on last usage Windows has not correct stored that the drive should not be remounted automatically.

UltraEdit offers an Explorer like view - the Explorer tab in File Tree view. The drives listed there are according to drive information of Windows. If Windows tells UltraEdit a drive X exists which is currently not available, you will notice a delay in UltraEdit because UE tries to get information about this not yet available drive for the Explorer view.

Windows Explorer does the same, but the first time already after login during desktop loading and then permanently in the background controlled by the registry keys RestoreConnection, NoRemoteRecursiveEvents and NoRemoteChangeNotify for mapped network drives. There is also one for local drives, but I can't yet find it. So while users notice the delay caused by accessing a drive not yet available in UltraEdit on startup, they normally don't notice the same delay of Windows Explorer because it happens after login during desktop load and normally the loading process needs already many seconds.

One way to prevent a drive access by UltraEdit on a drive not yet available on startup is to close the File Tree view or select for example the Open tab before exit. Just using auto-hide for File Tree view with Explorer tab active does not result in turning off the load of drive and directory information at startup.

[marstech]

I don't use the Recent Files menu option anyway, so I did all that you suggested there.

I had already tried closing the File window on the side. It has always been hidden to where it slides in and out, but I removed it a while back to see if that would help.

I understand what you are saying about the library UltraEdit is using, I've done some programming myself. I use a lot of software on my computer and this is the only application with this type of issue. I went through a similar problem with VMware a while back, but it turned out to be something to due with proxy internet setting in Internet Explorer and another small tweak.

I'll test this and see if we got it. Thanks for all your assistance.

One day later: Unfortunately the problem still persists. I was hoping that was it, but had my doubts as I never use the third hard drive. It gets backups from the second one. About to through the towel in. I do very much appreciate all your help though.

[Mofi]

I looked into my Process Monitor log of UE v17.10.0.1010 for the same operation and found it twice. The location where I found it in the log let me think that this is done for licensing and this operation needs just a few microseconds on my computer. But your third hard disk is perhaps an USB hard disk and then this operation can take much longer when the information is not already in cache of Windows respectively the hard disk is not completely mounted. But I don't understand why this operation is done not only on primary hard disk. I will sent an email to IDM with the suggestion to improve this process. At the moment I think you can't do anything to avoid this delay except turning off the third hard disk completely when not needed.

IDM support replied to my email that they would not expect this operation to be executed on all installed drives, too. Our observations are forwarded to the developers of IDM so they can investigate this.

[marstech]

Thanks. I have three drives in this system. The first two are the 320 Series Intel SSD. The third is a Western Digital Green 1TB. My O/S and UltraEdit are on the first drive. The ftp settings were previously on the second drive before I deleted them. The third as we had discussed should have nothing to do with UltraEdit. I'm assuming it is looking at all my hard drives if this stems from a licensing check. It hasn't always done this. It just started in the last several months. Just letting you know this in case it helps.