Accessing history from just a couple of hours ago in my rich text document is not working because it is slow.

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I hit "load more history" maybe 4 times, and the first couple times it loaded reasonably quickly but it exponentially slowed down until I got afraid to click anywhere and finally it didn't work at all. My Chrome browser tab for Cryptpad just turns black after being unresponsive for a certain time while the CPU is spinning.

The document is one that my team of 12 people use to write a few bullet points each about what we plan to do this week, each week. So there are a decent amount of changes to this document, but really nothing crazy. We do at least create a new document every 3 months to prevent the history from building up too much and taking too long for the doc to load in general (I thought that would help assuming clients replay e2ee events to reconstruct the document).

The reason I needed the history feature is because twice now our document appeared to go back in time on its own (maybe someone reverted a previous version by mistake?) and I wanted to find the last version before all the latest updates were lost. Both times the symptoms of this issue were the same.

We are on the cryptpad.fr instance.

Just reporting this issue, but any advice would be great too. Thank you!

    alexsapps hello!

    Have you tried purging the history from the document properties as explained in our User Guide? As a matter of fact it won't delete the whole document history, just compact it and retain major edits.

    If you don't want to do that, could you share with us a screenshot of the properties modal of the said document? Only CryptPad.fr administrators will be able to access metadata of your document with the identifier from the screenshot, and we of course won't be able to access your data. Here is an example of one of mine:

    A Rich Text document Properties modal with some information displayed

    Also it could be useful to know a few things about the device you use to access the said document:

    • Brand and model
    • Year of first sale
    • CPU/RAM
    • Web browser and version

    I just deleted the history, which was just over 100 MB as of today. The document itself is 817 kB.

    Now I see the compacted history and it's snappy to browse through it, but it doesn't go back past ~ 3 days ago. Maybe if I had done it earlier I would've been able to see the data I'm trying to recover.

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    I'll try deleting (i.e. compacting) the history each week after our meetings and/or as soon as I realize something's gone wrong and see if that helps.

    Thank you Mathilde ๐Ÿ™‚

    4 days later

    It appears that over just two days our document accumulated 20 MB of history (I deleted the history on Saturday).
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    It's still much less than 100 MB, but after probably 15 minutes I'm still really struggling to load history before 9AM this morning.
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    So I guess I'd need to delete the history every few hours for it to be reliable ๐Ÿ˜… Any other ideas? ๐Ÿ™‚

    Memory usage of the tab (which is unresponsive) is 213 MB and it's using ~ 230% CPU

    I'm on a Google Pixelbook 2017, Chrome OS Version 126.0.6478.252 (Official Build) (64-bit)
    RAM: 16GB
    CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7Y75 CPU @ 1.30GHz

    (I was trying this again today because our document went back in time again, but I'm planning to make another post about that. Someone else on my team was able to see the history earlier this morning so we were able to recover some stuff, but I'm not able to go back as far as they did now that more history was accumulated.)

      alexsapps It appears that over just two days our document accumulated 20 MB of history

      Hello!

      Quick question: do you do a lot of styling of the document? Have some text in bold, underlined, with a background color, etc?

      Ultimately, to be able to have a good look at the potential issue it will be useful to be able to take a look at the document itself. Don't hesitate to reach out to the CryptPad.fr support team: https://cryptpad.fr/support/

        Mathilde

        Yes, each week we add a table at the top of the document with one row per teammate, and goals listed as bullet points. Each bullet point is highlighted based on how well we met that goal.

        Update: submitted ticket with access to documents: #QanUqWCcez