I need a Photos expert, please

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MacInWin
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Patrick, it reminds me of an event when I worked at a major university. We had installed an application that used Oracle as the database to track our students. We tracked all current students, all former students, all graduates, all applicants, all alums, no matter how long it had been. So our "student" database had a couple of million records in it. We got a data input from the college boards of the score of all test-takers who had indicated interest in that university, about 250,000 records monthly. The first time we ran the merge, it ran forever. We called the vendor and talked with the programmers. They said they had a routine in the merge to make sure that a new record was never created if there was a record already there (which is a good thing) but that the routine had to take into account the many variations in the name (initials, nicknames, marriages, divorces, adoptions, you name it). We asked if they had tested it and they said they had. We asked for details, were told they had merged 3 names into a database of 10 names and the job finished in 7 minutes. When we pointed out that 7 minutes to merge 3 into 10 isn't a good thing, they said nobody had ever complained before.

So my DBA spent a weekend, wrote a new routine that did the same merge of 250,000 into our huge database in three minutes. We sent it to the vendor's developers who basically said, "not built here" and dismissed it.

So I suspect that if Apple tested, it was with a couple of pictures and one face. Nothing like reality.

I don't want to mess with it at this point. I may look at a reinstall or to whack some plists once it's done, but for now, I'll let it chug. I don't shut down the Mac, so it has the full machine overnights, but it doesn't seem to want any CPU at all.
 
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When we pointed out that 7 minutes to merge 3 into 10 isn't a good thing, they said nobody had ever complained before.


Sad!! That points out two of my real pet peeves lately — incompetence and idiots. We can't seem to escape them up here and they seem to be getting worse, and I fear you have more than enough of them down in your area as well.





- Patrick
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So it finished, sort of, yesterday. It's now showing my "People" page without a "scanning" message. But it now says "People will finish updating when Photos is in the background." I have no idea what that really means as Photos is currently taking 0.0% CPU. As I recall, if you put a zero in the denominator, the ratio becomes undefined, so with that, it appears it will never finish and make that message go away.
 
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Thanks, Bob, it's nice to know I'm not the only one with this problem. The post in that thread that really got me chuckling was the Apple fanboy who claimed that having to wait 6 months for the scan was not a bug because the person who complained had a "dream" about how it should work. Frankly, other products can scan faces much faster, so it must be something in the way Apple implemented it. Reminds me of a story from a couple of decades ago. We started a process to add some names into a database and after running 24 hours it had processed 10 names out of the 100,000 needing to be added to the 800,000 already in the database. We contacted the developers and asked if they had tested the routine with a live load. Yes, they said, they had tested by entering 3 names into a database with 10 names and it completed in 7 minutes. Not a very realistic test. My programmer spent a weekend and rewrote the routine himself to complete the job in 3 minutes. Strangely, the company was not interested in the "fix" as they insisted there was no "bug" to be fixed!Lucky Patcher (outdated link removed) 9Apps (outdated link removed) VidMate (outdated link removed)

I do have video files, not many, but some, and the "live" photos all create a video file for the few seconds they run. That may be contributing to the creakiness, but the bottom line is that Photos has simply stopped processing files, at least according to Activity Monitor. There is slow and then there is stopped. Right now, it's stopped
.

it's not easy to finish the job in 3 minutes bravo frankly
 
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