OneNote 2007 suddenly hogging resources

[Grant Robertson]

I have been using OneNote since it first came out and upgraded to ON 2007
when it came out. It has been generally working fine and has handled
about all I threw into it. Recently, I did a lot of reorganizing in my
"Reference" notebook. After that, I noticed that OneNote.exe was
seriously hogging resources. It keeps the CPU usage up around 75-85% and
continuously accesses the hard drive. The high resource usage stops
anytime I either exit OneNote, close my Reference notebook, or open the
Options dialog. I can only assume that it is working on reindexing all
the stuff I rearranged but this is taking way too long. I let it run
overnight and it is still grinding away.

I closed all my NoteBooks and deleted (actually just renamed) the OneNote
Cache folder. When I reopened the notebook, OneNote popped up a dialog
saying it was synchronizing the notebook. This stayed open for quite a
while then went away. However, OneNote is still hogging resources.

This notebook is pretty darn big. The total size of all the files in that
folder is about 2.5 GB (I store lots of stuff for future reference). Not
all of that is in actual OneNote .ONE files. A lot of it is just in
documents and other reference information that I stick in the same
folders. Is it possible that I have gone over some unstated limit for
notebook size? Is there something I can do to get OneNote to settle down?

 

[Erik Sojka]

Do you have Windows Desktop Search installed (if running under XP) or are
you running Vista (which includes WDS)? If you are running WDS, that
should handle all of the indexing for you. It may not be the indexing
process causing this.

Do you have a lot of audio notes in OneNote? What happens if you turn off
Tools | Options | Audio and Video | "Enable Searching audio and video
recordings for words"?

OneNote might also be either optimizing the files or doing a backup. I
would check those settings to see if there is a frequency of those tasks in
the configuration which could explain the CPU activity.

I would also not worry about it too much. ON is pretty good about
relinquishing resources when needed and using them when the system is idle.

 

[Grant Robertson]

Do you have Windows Desktop Search installed (if running under XP) or are
you running Vista (which includes WDS)? If you are running WDS, that
should handle all of the indexing for you. It may not be the indexing
process causing this.

Yes, I do have WDS. And I checked WDS's status and it said all the stuff
it was set to index was indexed.

Do you have a lot of audio notes in OneNote? What happens if you turn off
Tools | Options | Audio and Video | "Enable Searching audio and video
recordings for words"?

I only have a couple of audio notes in OneNote but I know the quality is
nowhere near good enough for voice recognition so it is already turned
off.

OneNote might also be either optimizing the files or doing a backup. I
would check those settings to see if there is a frequency of those tasks in
the configuration which could explain the CPU activity.

Backup was set to only run once a day. I just turned it off and it hasn't
made any difference. (Yes, I did restart OneNote after changing the
setting.)

I would also not worry about it too much. ON is pretty good about
relinquishing resources when needed and using them when the system is idle.

Yes, I have noticed that it doesn't really slow down my computer much.
But it does slow it down some. I am primarily concerned about the
constant high CPU usage overheating my CPU or the constant drive
accessing overheating my drives or simply wearing them out prematurely.

Since it only happens when my Reference notebook is open I am going to
try opening only subfolders within that notebook separately (as if they
were notebooks) and see if the problem only occurs when one of the is
open. That way I may be able to narrow the problem down to a single
folder.

What about the chance that I have just bumped up against some maximum
notebook size limit?

 

[Ricco Reimann]

There is no size limit for OneNote notebooks.

You didn't change your system recently (- new software, or even slight
configuration modifications etc. -), and turning off WDS changes nothing?

In that case, consider a hard disk damage. Your problem description sounds
quite typical. It seems like Windows tries and tries again to access sectors
it can't read. It's possible, that after the reorganizing some of the
ONE-files covers one or more bad sectors. Give the corresponding hard disk a
hardware diagnosis. But I wouldn't rely solely on the tools delivered with
your copy of Windows. Try advanced tools like the HDD Regenerator
(http://www.abstradrome.com/hdd.html).

Ricco.

 

[Grant Robertson]

I have been using OneNote since it first came out and upgraded to ON 2007
when it came out. It has been generally working fine and has handled
about all I threw into it. Recently, I did a lot of reorganizing in my
"Reference" notebook. After that, I noticed that OneNote.exe was
seriously hogging resources. It keeps the CPU usage up around 75-85% and
continuously accesses the hard drive. The high resource usage stops
anytime I either exit OneNote, close my Reference notebook, or open the
Options dialog. I can only assume that it is working on reindexing all
the stuff I rearranged but this is taking way too long. I let it run
overnight and it is still grinding away.

Come to find out I had had a virus at some point in the past. It had
found some folders buried deep in my Reference notebook directory
structure and had been creating tens of thousands of files in quite a few
of them. OneNote had been able to cache them easily as they were slowly
created over time. However, when I rearranged some subfolders I moved the
location of all those virus-created files and OneNote was working it's
butt off trying to cache all those files. Why it didn't just ignore them
I don't know. Perhaps it needed to at least read the file to see if it
was a .ONE file but you would think that could be done pretty quickly. I
was able to to a dir listing of all the files in about 25 minutes. (yes,
there were that many.) All the filenames started with a { and then had a
random series of characters. The files were set as system files so they
wouldn't have even shown up if I used the default Windows Explorer
options. I just opened up a DOS console and used attrib to set all their
attributes and then deleted all the files in one go with DEL {* /S.

I downloaded BitDefender and ran a scan. My current install is clean so
the virus must have been cleaned out long ago.

Oh, well. Thanks for trying to help.

 

[Rainald Taesler]

Thanks for your success report, Grant!

Rainald

Come to find out I had had a virus at some point in the past. It had
found some folders buried deep in my Reference notebook directory
structure and had been creating tens of thousands of files in quite
a few of them. OneNote had been able to cache them easily as they
were slowly created over time. However, when I rearranged some
subfolders I moved the location of all those virus-created files
and OneNote was working it's butt off trying to cache all those
files. Why it didn't just ignore them I don't know. Perhaps it
needed to at least read the file to see if it was a .ONE file but
you would think that could be done pretty quickly. I was able to to
a dir listing of all the files in about 25 minutes. (yes, there
were that many.) All the filenames started with a { and then had a
random series of characters. The files were set as system files so
they wouldn't have even shown up if I used the default Windows
Explorer options. I just opened up a DOS console and used attrib to
set all their attributes and then deleted all the files in one go
with DEL {* /S.

I downloaded BitDefender and ran a scan. My current install is
clean so the virus must have been cleaned out long ago.

Oh, well. Thanks for trying to help.