Openlp slow song search

Srmc

Hi all
I've just upgraded to an SSD drive fresh install of windows and updated to openlp version 3.1.6

When searching for songs it's very slow and if I press delete to clear the text search it is lagging.
Sometimes there is a message saying openlp is not responding.
Is my database too big or need indexing.
I upgraded to make things faster but now it's even slower.
Cheers Marcus

ok i have had time to try and sort this but no luck so far.
i have used AI to try and help and it suggested to use SQLlite to run
Vacuum
and to index the Title
however this has no effect on speeding things up.
I ran the upgrade on another machine and it did the same thing.
The CPU goes up to 50% when you start to delete the search so you can try another name.
as you get to the last letter Openlp says not responding and then comes back to life.
The CPU then drops and you can then do another search. this is a repeating pattern, and on different hardware.

Ai says that the software is working too hard searching the song Database as you delete each letter and this takes too much CPU power. The older version of of Openlp 3.0.2 did not have this issue so there is something happening with the upgrade to cause this.
I did try the latest version to see if that would help but its just the same 3.1.6.
Not sure how to proceed other than reverting back to the old version and never upgrading.

Timon

The issue you’re seeing is due to how OpenLP constructs titles at runtime. You can't optimize the database to improve performance. The good news is that I was also frustrated by the slow search time, so I fixed the source code to make song searches much faster. This improvement will be included in the next major version of OpenLP.

https://gitlab.com/openlp/openlp/-/merge_requests/865

Srmc

Hi Timon and OpenLP Team,
First off, thank you for all the work you’ve put into OpenLP—it’s been a fantastic tool for our church, and version 3.0.2 has served us reliably.

I have been trying to look at what the issue was with 3.1.6 , if you reduce the size of the SONG database it does get faster when clearing the search or deleting the text. its always the last letter to be deleted which causes CPU to go to 50% for X seconds .
but the issue Specifically seems to be:

Typing a search term like “Where You Go I Go” works fine.
But deleting the search string—especially down to a single letter like “w”—causes OpenLP to freeze or become unresponsive for several seconds.
It appears that the live search is triggered on every keystroke, including deletes, and attempts to match all songs containing that single character. This overwhelms the CPU and causes delays.

Suggested Fix:
A simple solution might be to implement a minimum search length threshold (e.g. 3 characters) before triggering the live search. This would prevent unnecessary queries on single letters and improve performance for users with large databases.
I'm not a coder so don't know if what you have done is a better solution or if this would improve things further as there is little point in searching the whole Database for a single letter or even 2.

I’d be happy to help test or provide logs if needed. Thanks again for your work on this project—it’s deeply appreciated.

Best regards,
Marcus

Timon

Hi SRMC,

The true cause of the CPU spike is that every time a search is triggered, all titles and associated artists are read from the database, and the title shown in OpenLP is constructed from that data. Clearing the search field triggers this processing for all songs, which takes a long time.

There are some character limits depending on the search method used, but these limits don’t apply to all parts of the processing.

I left the original logic unchanged, but I implemented caching for the titles shown in the search results. Thanks to this change, I was able to reduce the processing time on my machine from 4.6 seconds (with 844 songs) to less than 0.05 seconds when clearing the search field.