1Password 8 UI slow / freezes

lamsquat
lamsquat
Community Member

I have been encountering UI freezes or very bad responsiveness in the 1P UI. This applies to the main app as well as Quick Acesss and browser addons. This has been going on basically since the migration from v7 and I had always attributed it to the switch to some terrible cross platform UI stack. But recently this has become so bad that 1P has become almost unusable. Since this does not seem to affect other users as much as myself I guess there might some other problem in my setup as well.

Here's a GIF of what I am experiencing in Quick Access. You'll notice the multiple seconds freeze during the first opening as well as in the second search.

I would appreciate any help in how to narrow down or fix this issue.


1Password Version: 1Password for Mac 8.10.34 (81034040)
Extension Version: 2.18.2
OS Version: macOS 14.4.1 (23E224)
Browser: Not Provided

Comments

  • @lamsquat

    While not directly related, I recommend updating macOS, along with 1Password in the browser when possible.

    Do you see a difference if you disable hardware acceleration? It may not make a change. I would try all three things and see if it helps. If not it may be time to get you over to our technical team for further investigation.

    1Password >Settings > Advanced - Use Hardware acceleration.

  • nutjob4life
    nutjob4life
    Community Member

    @lamsquat thank you for creating that GIF. That's precisely what I see almost every time I use the "quick access". I can type ahead two-to-four words while the user interface just sits there twiddling its thumbs, not echoing back any characters I've typed.

    Eventually it starts to respond with an ugly display of text-on-text before it finally formats the matches to my search in a readable list.

    It's intolerably slow—but worse, it's been that way for all of version 8. This is easily the worst incarnation of 1Password and the only reason I haven't transitioned to another password manager is inertia.

  • lamsquat
    lamsquat
    Community Member

    For the sake of the argument I updated macOS as well as the browser extension to their latest versions. It did not make any difference. This would have been surprising since as @nutjob4life points out this has been going on since the upgrade to v8 over a year ago and I have undergone multiple major macOS upgrades in the meantime. It has just become increasingly bad instead of better as I hoped.

    I have also tested the Hardware Acceleration switch which also did not make any difference. I fiddled with that a couple of times over the months and could never see any effect.

    One additional observation: The freezes seem to be especially bad if the 1P main app has been opened and closed in between Quick Access or the browser addon has been used last and is being re-invoked. This is reproducible.

    I am deeply invested in the 1P plattform and migrating would be incredibly painful for me. I really like 1P and v7 was a fantastic product. But I am nearly at a point where the pain of using 1P v8 is enough to overcome my 'inertia' as @nutjob4life puts it. Please help 😢

  • Hi @lamsquat and @nutjob4life - I'm sorry to hear about the trouble that you're both having. The development team have been investigating reports of some performance issues in the latest version or two of 1Password for Mac. Pending a fix, this recent issue can be solved for most users by fully re-installing 1Password for Mac, including the supporting folders.

    That being said, it sounds like both of you have been experiencing these issues too long for them to be related to the other more recent reports. It could well be that environmental factors are at play here.

    I'd like to ask each of you to generate a diagnostics report from 1Password for Mac and to attach this to an email addressed tosupport+forum@1password.com.

    How to send a 1Password diagnostics report

    With your email please include:

    • A link to this thread: https://1password.community/discussion/146287/1password-8-ui-slow-freezes
    • Your forum username.

    You'll receive an automated reply from our BitBot assistant with a Support ID number.  Please post that number here and a member of the team will be back in touch shortly.

    Looking forward to helping further. 🙂

  • nutjob4life
    nutjob4life
    Community Member

    Okay @Kester.D_1P, using the uninstallation instructions I removed 1Password from my Mac (including from the various folders under ~/Library), rebooted, and reinstalled. So far, "quick access" works with good response times.

    But I'll report back if that changes.

  • Thanks nutjob4life We appreciate you doing that.

  • lamsquat
    lamsquat
    Community Member

    Following your comments I also tried re-installing 1P. I had tried this before, but this time I was extra thorough in removing all traces of the installtion. I did even go as far as grepping all folders mentioned in the linked uninstalation instructions for 1Password related terms. This resulted in the removal of multiple 1Password related items I had previously missed. Even going back to files from the 1Password 4 era (I started using 1P with v3 and the affected macOS installation did not have a clean install since then).

    The freshly installed 1P v8 is now much faster (so far). I guess we are looking at some problem in the migration process for long time 1P users here that trips up 1Password 8.

    Let's hope this is a permanent fix. I wish had done this a year ago ...

  • @lamsquat

    I'm sorry you had this trouble. If something happens like this again, please be sure to talk with our technical team. They may be able to offer suggestions like this.

  • nutjob4life
    nutjob4life
    Community Member

    I wish had done this a year ago ...

    Same here. I suffered and seethed, growing to hate 1Password 8 because of this frustrating "quick access" issue—but looking at the 1000s of items I had in the vault and dreading moving to another password manager.

    Ideally it would've been best if 1Password 8 could've detected and recovered from whatever bad data was left over and work around it, and failing that, at least advising in the release notes something like, "We recommend you install 1Password 8 from scratch rather than use the built-in upgrade procedure".

    But better late than never, eh? My "hate" is at last abating 😝

  • @nutjob4life

    I'm happy that removing your 1Password data and then reinstalling 1Password 8 improved the situation for you. 1Password 8 doesn't interact with any files/folders that might be leftover from previous versions of the desktop app so it's not likely that those files would have caused the performance issue that you saw. However, sometimes removing 1Password 8's support files and reinstalling the app can improve things.

    If you do see the issue return then please let us know and we can dig deeper. 🙂

    -Dave