h.ogi blog

Feb 28, 2009

Google Contacts 0.5.12

Google Contacts 0.5.12 is now available for download. It fixes the following problem:

Fixed: adding/removing contacts sometime fails

Please note it is update release of v0.5.11 and is not an official release of the current betas.

Feb 23, 2009

Improving performace of Google Contacts

As many users reported, Google Contacts will slow down Thunderbird when you load many contacts. I started to address the issue and I uploaded the first beta. Please download v0.5.50b1 and try it. Don't forget to backup your contacts before use it. I don't owe any responsibilities for any problems such as data lost.

This beta addresses two performance issues. One is that Thunderbird will freeze when you load many contacts. Freezing Thunderbird is caused by occupying CPU power while loading and parsing contacts data from Google. The new beta yields sometimes while processing data. It will reduce the "Unresponsive script" warnings. Please note it only reduces periods Google Contacts occupy CPU power and it will not shorten the time for a synchronization.

Another issue is high memory usage. When you load many contacts, for example more than 1000 contacts, Google Contacts receives 10MB data or more. It holds it in the main memory and don't release until Thunderbird is finished. So, Thunderbird sometime uses more than 100MB memory and may slow down your PC. v0.5.50b1 newly has a cache functionality. It shares the same memory usage in synchronization.But after the synchronization, it try to release data in the memory. It is experimental functionality and I don't know whether it works on your environment. If you don't need it, you can disable it in the option dialog of Google Contacts. See "Advanced" tab in the dialog.

I don't have contacts whose size is enough to test the version. So, I have not sure the effectivity of the changes. Please let me know how much does it improve or make it worse if you can test it.

And again, please don't forget to backup your data.

Feb 11, 2009

Getting back to work

I've restarted addons development. While I'd stopped the development I'd received many mails and blog comments. I'll reply them first and then restart the development.

Thanks for your patience.

Jan 17, 2009

Stopping add-ons development and support

I've moved into a house and I cannot share times to add-ons development. Moreover, the new house is offline so far. So, it is difficult to update this blog, too.

So, please let me stop the development and support for a while. It is OK to mail me and post a comment to this blog but my reply will late. I'll inform you when I start them at this blog.

Google Contacts 0.5.11

Google Contacts v0.5.10 has a problem in group synchronization. So, I've released Google Contacts v0.5.11 which disables the optimization of synchronization in v0.5.10. I plan to rewrite the synchronization process in order to improve its speed and memory usage. Please use v0.5.11 until the next version is released.