I updated my Evernote app on my Mac to what I believe is version 1.6 (for reasons which will become apparent in what follows, I haven’t been able to check this within the app). Since that update the Mac app has become a memory sink of note, so much so that I just posted the following to the user forum:

The latest Evernote for Mac update is a shocker! I upgraded when I was prompted to do so and found that the app typically takes a few minutes to load and become usable (before then it is either unresponsive or I get a spinning beachball). It starts up using around 300MB of “Real Memory” (I believe that is the correct metric) and as I type this it is using around 435MB and the app still haven’t become usable yet. I left the app running on my MacBook during the day yesterday or so and found it was using around 700MB. This update seems to have converted Evernote into a memory sink.

I also find that the Mac app is incredibly sluggish for me. I have roughly 4 500+ notes and of those notes, around 3 500 to 4 000 are PDFs (I scan straight to PDF using my ScanSnap). The app is very sluggish when I try accessing notes, navigating to other notebooks and search for notes. I don’t know if the PDF volume impacts on this or not or whether this means the underlying database is bloated/broken but the end result is that Evernote is becoming more of a chore to use than something I want to use every day, all the time. I haven’t been able to load the app and view the version number for the purposes of this post so I have included the file name in the subject line.

Heck, this morning I wanted to type up a shopping list and it was quicker to open TextEdit, type up the note, print it out and give it to my wife than it was to open Evernote and create a new note.

Evernote is supposed to be my constant companion on my Mac. I used to have it open automatically when I booted up my Mac because I use it for everything. One of the reasons I have so many notes and PDFs at that is because I have been dumping all my old documents into Evernote to make it all easier to find and more useful to me.

This sluggish behaviour isn’t new to this version. I just noticed I filed a similar post for version 1.4.9 and I was told that the app would “pause for a bit” when loading large PDFs. This isn’t pausing “for a bit”, it is stalling and crashing. It is also tremendously disappointing. I have been evangelising Evernote here in South Africa and a number of people have started using it because I have been so passionate about the app and the service. Surely this must be something you can fix?

This is what my memory usage looked like shortly before I force quit the application (it was not responding):

This screenshot is a reading that was increasing steadily towards 1GB. Not good.