Nitro Pro 11 freezes while scrolling | PIPLog.txt excessive disk usage

[Allain Umailin]

Hello @lmg970,

Thank you for reaching out to us through our Community Forums!

To submit a support case, you must have an active Nitro VIP Access (formerly Software Assurance).

In order for me to further assist you, could you please provide me with the following?:
-Is this a new issue or has it occurred since the beginning? When did it start happening? Any changes you're aware of before this happened?
-What OS is installed in your computer (Windows 7, 8.0, 8.1 or 10 and whether it is 32-bit or 64 bit)?
-What build of Nitro Pro are you working with? You can find this out by clicking on 'About Nitro Pro' under the Help tab (format is 11.X.X.X, e.g. 11.0.5.271
-What steps are you performing when Nitro Pro freezes? Are you just opening PDFs, coverting, editing or just scolling a large PDF?
-Does this happen with every file? If it's a single file, please send us the sample file (with sensitive information extracted) so I can replicate it on my end
-Where are the files saved (local, a shared drive or an external drive) when the product freezes? Can you check if you have the same issue when the file is saved locally?

Thank you very much in advance and I am looking forward to hearing back from you. 

[tech_head]

while researching this exact bug which exists in latest downloaded Nitro Pro 11 and my older Nitro Reader Free 5.* the PIPLog.txt UI activity logging file is the culprit in both programs and there appears to not be any setting to switch off this activity logging. I tried an old trick that sometimes works in similar cases where a file is created by a program and I don't want it to be...

Exit the specific instances of Nitro Reader/Pro and open the requisite Roaming/Nitro/ ..... as described in the thread starter and if the file PIPLog.txt remains simply delete it and then create a New Folder and rename it to PIPLog.txt

When the corresponding Nitro Reader/Pro starts next time it will try and create the file PIPLog.txt and silently fail since a folder by the same name already exists in the same folder and Nitro Reader and Nitro Pro no longer stalls when the activity logger thrashes the hard drive accessing the PIPLog.txt file.

It is a great relief to finally be able to scroll through chip datasheets without the program locking up periodically!

Hope this helps end users until either a setting is provided in an upgrade to disable the activity logging or it is mediated in some other way.

[Nomde]

On 10/19/2018 at 12:49 AM, tech_head said:

while researching this exact bug which exists in latest downloaded Nitro Pro 11 and my older Nitro Reader Free 5.* the PIPLog.txt UI activity logging file is the culprit in both programs and there appears to not be any setting to switch off this activity logging. I tried an old trick that sometimes works in similar cases where a file is created by a program and I don't want it to be...

Exit the specific instances of Nitro Reader/Pro and open the requisite Roaming/Nitro/ ..... as described in the thread starter and if the file PIPLog.txt remains simply delete it and then create a New Folder and rename it to PIPLog.txt

When the corresponding Nitro Reader/Pro starts next time it will try and create the file PIPLog.txt and silently fail since a folder by the same name already exists in the same folder and Nitro Reader and Nitro Pro no longer stalls when the activity logger thrashes the hard drive accessing the PIPLog.txt file.

It is a great relief to finally be able to scroll through chip datasheets without the program locking up periodically!

Hope this helps end users until either a setting is provided in an upgrade to disable the activity logging or it is mediated in some other way.

Thanks to tech_head!  Nitro should give you a lifetime license just for this one comment.

I have had this issue since the day I installed V10.  I do a fair amount of scrolling through pages of scanned documents as well as a lot of cropping and Nitro has been freezing for 30 seconds or more for the past couple of years.  I have lost many many hours of productivity waiting for the unnecessary disk writing.  I think I wrote the original ticket on this issue.  I have had multiple sessions with Nitro engineers, using screen sharing so they could watch me demonstrate the issue and they did know it appeared to be due to some disk writing activity but they were never able to figure out why (after two years).  One engineers comment while watching me demonstrate the problem was "wow, that's reeeeeally bad".  Yep.  Nitro even created a group of customers who were experiencing the issue to comment on any details we could provide, but even with their efforts, all I ever heard them say was "we can't recreate the issue".

I just followed tech_head's suggestion above to create a PIPLog.txt folder and did about an hours worth of editing with no freeze ups at all.  FINALLY.  I wonder why this this log file exists.  It would be ironic if it is used by support to help identify issues and it is in fact cause of the issue.

Now that the problem file has been identified, at least my specific version of the issue, maybe Nitro can make some progress.

My PIPLog.txt file was 14.2 MB, which seems extremely large for a text file.  I opened the file in Notepad and Notepad froze for about 15 seconds while it opened the file.  I'm guessing that this file isn't supposed to be nearly this big and the huge size explains why Nitro freezes when it writes to it.

Nomde

[Barrie Green]

tech-head - you are a genius!

I have had this problem for years.

I had a bit of an issue locating 'AppData' - for some reason it was a Hidden Folder. But when Google explained how to view Hidden Folders it was plain sailing from there.

Why has Nitro not picked up this fix?