Knox is running VERY slow.

Robert Mills

I have created a few large vaults & also formatted a couple of drives to Knox vaults. Now, Knox is running terribly slow. I get a swirling beach ball when I attempt to do anything in the Knox Preferences. Even Mounting and Unmounting the Vaults, Knox chokes & stalls. Disk Utility seem like it mounts the images/vault with greater ease.



Do vault sizes or number of vaults have anything to do with performance of the Knox application?



Thanks



PS. I am running all the latest version of Know and system software.

MikeT

[quote name='Robert Mills']I have created a few large vaults & also formatted a couple of drives to Knox vaults. Now Know is running terribly slow. I get a swirling beach ball when I attempt to do anything in the Knox Preferences or even Mounting and Unmounting the Vaults Knox is choking & stalling. Disk Utility seem like it mounts the images/vault with greater ease.



Do Vault sizes or number of vaults have anything to do with performance?



Disk util



Thanks



PS. I am running all the latest version of Know and system software.[/QUOTE]



Do you see any errors in Console.app? What's the size and number of vaults did you create and are they encrypted?



The vault size does impact the performance as well as encryption support for it. It takes some time to mount large vaults to make them readable to you, even slower with stronger encryption. My 300gb sparseimage with AES-128 encryption takes about 5-10 seconds to mount and its on an external drive via fw-800 port to an '08 MBP with 2.5GHz/4GB/SSD machine. I'm going to assume its taking far longer for you?



The thing is, it's not really suppose to make Knox slow as Know has no impact on how the vaults run. It's just a small app that'll hold all your sparseimages in one place and make it easy for you to manage them as well as creating new ones and backing them up.

Robert Mills

The performance issues you mention are to be expected.



I will just use Disk Image to mount the images. The Knox application & preferences are basically useless to me after the vaults are created. Due to the fact that Knox Chokes, Stalls and Crashes anytime time I try to do anything with it. I hope it improves.

MartyS

We have seen some cases of Knox Preferences corruption causing very slow behavior of the menu. The only workaround is to delete the preferences file and then tell Knox about the vaults that it should track.



Please follow these steps to reset the Knox preferences:



1. Quit Knox.



2. Use the Apple Finder to remove the Knox preferences file. To do this, go to your Library > Preferences folder and move the "com.knoxformac.knox.plist" file to your Desktop. They can be trashed later, but for now be conservative so you don't accidentally trash the wrong file.



3. Start Knox. Since Knox thinks this is the first time you've run it on this computer you will see the Welcome screen.



4. Click on the Vaults pane. You should now drag from the Finder any Knox vaults that you want to "manage" within Knox to the Vaults area of the preferences. A green plus-sign ("+") will appear and you can release the vault. Repeat with any other vaults. You *will* need to setup any desired backup location for each vault and review the other Knox preferences.

Robert Mills

I tried all of this on my own. I have basically given up on Knox. It won't even open anymore.



I will look for updates. I am an avid user of 1password and believe if anyone can get this right it is you guys.

dteare

[quote name='Robert Mills']I tried all of this on my own. I have basically given up on Knox. It won't even open anymore.[/quote]



I'm sorry for the trouble! This is certainly not the typical experience and I'd love to figure out what is happening here.



Can you please recreate the issue and then open Activity Monitor, select the Knox process, and press the Sample Process button on the toolbar? If Knox is still slow after the sample is complete (it takes 2 seconds), take a few more samples until it starts to respond again. Then email the samples to [email]support@agile.ws[/email] along with a link to this thread so we can take a look and see if we can track down what is happening.



[quote name='Robert Mills']I will look for updates. I am an avid user of 1password and believe if anyone can get this right it is you guys.[/QUOTE]



Thank you for the vote of confidence! We purchased Knox recently and are still getting to know our way around the code. It's been harder than we expected but lots of fun too :)

kathyj

I've been having the same problem. I got a couple of hard drives encrypted but now Knox is barely useable. I have upgraded to the latest version but with no luck.



When I look in Console I get this:



20/07/2010 23:21:02 Knox[1020] ERROR! -[NSFileManager aliasRecordDataFromPath:] CFURLGetFSRef from path '/Users/'username'/Documents/Knox' failed. URL for path is file://localhost/Users/'username'/Documents/Knox



Hope this helps in finding out what's going on.

jstarship

Experiencing the same problem here. It was fine until a week ago, and then it's just running so slow, that I can't do anything with it.

roustem

Thank you for reporting this problem.



We published a new version of Knox a few minutes ago. Please give it a try and let us know if it works better for you.

stp17

Knox is useful.

keso17

Thanks for the update

Robert Mills

[quote name='keso17' timestamp='1282101425' post='9062']

Thanks for the update

[/quote]





I tried v2.0.5. No change.

dlake

I'm seeing similar issues. Any updates on this?

Aelver

I just purchased and am having the same issue, most disappointing. <img src='http://forum.agile.ws/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/angry.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':angry:' />



Spinning ball, generally unresponsive. Have tried deleting the .prefs file, no improvement. Seemed ok until I registered. I have one vault of 750meg.



I've emailed some Knox process samples to your support email.



Thanks.

MartyS

Welcome to the forums, Aelver! Thanks for sending us the process samples. We'll pickup with you via email as we do need some additional information from you about your system.

Robert Mills

This has not been resolved in the past few updates.



My work around is to use Knox to create the sparse bundles/vaults . DO NOT have Knox launch at start up.



And simply mount the Vaults with Disk Utility.

MartyS

[quote name='Robert Mills' timestamp='1294317958' post='18545']

This has not been resolved in the past few updates.



My work around is to use Knox to create the sparse bundles/vaults . DO NOT have Knox launch at start up.



And simply mount the Vaults with Disk Utility.

[/quote]



I'm sorry to hear that you're still having troubles! Have your symptoms changed at all from the original post -- that of slow responsiveness when you click on the Knox icon in the menu bar or when you try to change its preferences?



As Mike indicated back when you first reported these conditions, the Knox application can be thought of as a "helper" application. It watches for drives being mounted and dismounted on your system so that it can then mount vaults that it is monitoring. And it is a useful utility for creating the vaults in the first place. Most of the time it doesn't do anything else but monitor what devices are being attached, etc., although it does have an additional workload when it performs backups.



Do you have any circumstances on your system where device attachment is occurring on a recurring basis frequently, or some other activity that might look like that to OS X (and thus to Knox)?



For the time being, an easier method of mounting Knox vaults could be to double-click them using the Finder (or equivalent). That method may not work for whole-drive vaults but should certainly work for the file-based vaults that Knox can create.



We'd love to work with you on getting this issue understood better, and addressing it for you if at all possible. Please let us know, and thanks for telling us that we haven't yet resolved your issue!