Jabref v5.0 freezes with several operations

Help
1

JabRef 5.0–2020-03-06–2e6f433
Windows 10 10.0 amd64
Java 13.0.2

I have been a longtime JabRef user (~10 years) and largely had positive experience with it both on Windows and Linux. Thank you for providing such a great piece of software!

Few weeks ago I switched to v5.0 on my windows 10 laptop. Since then I have been seeing a lot of freezes for several operations. The most unbearable one is with search, similar to this issue and often takes ~15-20 seconds to show the result. In addition to this, other actions are also very slow. Eg: Pressing new entry button take ~4-5 secs. Typing anything in the entry editor takes 4-5 seconds. Pretty much any operation take 3-4 seconds. After each click CPU spikes to 100% usage.

My library has ~800 entries. I tried the same with a dummy 2-entry library and things were very fluid. At least few things I tried with dummy library. I looked into Help->event log and did not find anything there.

Are there any suggestions, recommendations, or changes in preference to try?

I will also try version 4.x as well to see if I see similar behavior.

2

Hi,
Known problem which is fixed in the upcoming 5.1 version which will be released shortly. There the performance has been drastically improved.
In the meantime you can try out the latest master from here:
https://builds.jabref.org/master/

Please remember to make a backup of your library before trying out this new version.

3

Thank you for the response. The new build certainly helps!! Huge improvement.

BTW, is there a link for documentation for the new UI? May be I missed it on the website.

4

Hi,

thanks for the feedback!
Regarding help, you can find the help/documentation here. Note that it’s not always up to date, especially some screenshots are still showing an older version.
However, you can easily contribute and extend or clarify parts of the help. Just click on “Edit on Github”.
https://docs.jabref.org/