Quality of 1PW Mini in 1PW 7
Hey all, I've been using 1PW 7's new Mini for months now. Ever since it came out.
I have a lot of respect for what you all do. And your attention to detail. The amount of features that you all get out has, in the past, been pretty great and been of pretty high quality.
Unfortunately the new 1PW Mini is not that.
Now, before we go on, I'm not talking about the changes. I'm setting aside "Is it too big?", "Why isn't the sidebar collapsable/resizeable?", "What the hell is going on with the banners I can't control?", etc, etc. What I'm talking about is the quality of the features that are there.
TL;DR
I get the impression that 1PW 7's new Mini got pushed out based on some deadline for some dumb marketing reason. I can't remember if it was around WWDC or not, but I'm going to assume that was probably the driver. I hope this is a lesson to management that something isn't "Done" just because you want it to be. Listen to your developers.
Speed and Performance
I'm not setting aside performance, which should be a top concern, so let's get that out of the way first. 1PW Mini is SLOW. I'm pretty sensitive to speed because I navigate with the keyboard most of the time, but even if I wasn't it is INCREDIBLE how freaking slow it is. Just getting Mini to POP UP takes a FULL SECOND. I'm on a maxed out 2015 MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM. There's no reason for it to take that long to come up.
1PW Mini is currently taking up 588MB. That's FIVE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY EIGHT MEGABYTES OF MEMORY. For something that should be a quick search widget. This is getting far too into the territory of "Is it too big? Does it do too much?" so I'll stop there, but 588MB is more than the main Chrome process takes up. It's almost as much as the main Firefox process takes up.
Even something as simple as going into a list and pressing the arrow keys to scroll the list is so choppy as to the point that you don't even know where you are. You can't even arrow up/down through the Categories list without massive delays. Using the mouse is no better. There's a delay on clicking that is unacceptable.
Searching for items literally takes so long that I wonder if something is broken. Sometimes 5-10 seconds. I can search my entire HD for .DS_Store files in the time it takes 1PW to return results. It's completely unacceptable. And yes, I have "Search All Fields" turned on. And this is still unacceptable. If I can search Google to find everything on the entire internet in less than a tenth of a second, you all can find a way to index my local 1PW DB so that I can get results to my searches in less than 250ms. Not to mention the fact that in the old mini, this was pretty fast. So my assumption is that this is due to the additional complexity of the UI elements rather than search speed, but it doesn't matter because the end result is the same. Slow searches.
Bugs
In the past couple months I've run across so many bugs that I can't even remember them all. So many in fact, that I was originally going to post an issue for each one I found, but there were so many that it soon became clear that it wouldn't be worth my time to do that.
There's the "Random artifacts when scrolling" issue where, when you scroll, especially with the keyboard, the "Open and Fill" remains on items even after you arrow off of it.
There's the "Mini has no idea where you are so it starts spasming and sends you to a random place" issue
There's the "Click or press return on a password and instead of copying it to the clipboard it creates a new generated password" issue
There's the "Mini refuses to fill in your login in the browser page you're on" issue
There's the "Mini pops up in random locations" issue (as well as not working well with multiple monitors)
There's the "Mini pops up showing me a random login instead of the login for the page I'm on" issue (there are a ton of issues around the new "smart detection" feature, which I'm all in favor of, but the default use case needs to work 100% of the time)
There's the "Banner detection is ludicrously bad and causes them to show up on logins they shouldn't show up on. (Especially 2FA)." issue
I could go on... and on... and on... but the point is that there are a lot of bugs.
Conclusion
See the TL;DR
Thanks everyone.
1Password Version: Not Provided
Extension Version: Not Provided
OS Version: Not Provided
Sync Type: Not Provided
Comments
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Hi @jfelchner ,
I want to address part of your post. For individual bugs that you haven't mentioned before, please provide a separate post giving more details. I believe we are aware of many of them, but if you find some are not fixed, please let us know with an individual post providing details and steps to reproduce if possible.
The part I want to address is memory usage and performance. Even in 1Password 6, when the main app and mini were two separate processes (in 1Password 7, they are one process), the mini did all the heavy lifting. It has to read all of your items, decrypt them, sync them in the background, manage search and filling. You haven't mentioned how many vaults and items you have, so I can't really say if 588MB is too much. It depends on how many vaults, items you have and how much data is in those items. Now, if you find the memory usage keeps growing, but you aren't adding more items, then we have a memory leak, which is a bug that we can fix.
Note that the main Firefox and Chrome processes relatively very little. When you load a web page, it spawns a new process to handle each web page. So all of the layout, graphics, etc. is handled in the spawned process. The main app manages bookmarks, windows, preferences, and that's about it. I'm sure the developers of those browsers can provide better detail, but it's important to know that unlike a main browser process, 1Password has quit a bit to do. Also note that 1Password never stores decrypted data on disk - it must read in your items, decrypt them, and store them in memory.
Also, know that Google has the luxury of not having to protect data. Everything they offer for search is publicly available. So they get the luxury of being able to index everything and store it in plaintext and distribute it among their various servers. We have to protect your data - so we can't index it and store that index in plain text. If 1Password could do that, search could be much faster too. That's not to say there's nothing we can do. We have drastically improved unlock times for those with a large number of vaults and items recently, and optimizing search is on our list. These improvements are not going to happen overnight, as we have to consider that this is encrypted data we are working with, so it takes more time.
We do want to continue to improve 1Password and that doesn't just mean adding features. Memory usage and performance is part of that goal too.
Regards,
Kevin0 -
Isn't it amazing, though, that nowadays something that takes a second is intolerably slow!
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It's all relative. I can see the argument that if Google can do it in a few milliseconds and 1Password takes a full second that seems like a problem. But as Kevin mentioned 1Password faces very different challenges than Google in this regard.
Ben
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@ag_kevin as I mentioned in my post, the number of issues makes it time-prohibitive for me to post every one. I'm not an Agilebits employee. I have my own stuff to do. The point that I was making is that I'm perfectly willing to jump in here and help provide some free feedback and QA on my own dime, but there are so many bugs, that I can't do that even though I'm generally willing to. My point is that it's clear this was pushed out half-baked.
I have a couple dozen vaults and about 800 items. Not a huge amount by any stretch of the imagination. Now, as I said, I don't know if the slowness is due to the searching, or if it's due to a sluggish UI, but you can't tell me that searching all the fields of 800 items should be as slow as it currently is. Nor that 588MB is a reasonable amount of memory.
I understand the issue around keeping things secure. I also understand the issue around indexing. And if 1PW Mini had NEVER been fast, that would be one thing, but 1PW 7's Mini is SUBSTANTIALLY slower than 1PW 6's Mini. 1PW 6's Mini search speed was not fantastic, but it was acceptable. So apparently it's entirely possible to make it much faster. It also seems to point to the fact that it's the new Mini that's the issue and not searching per-se. Which again, makes my point that this new Mini was rushed out the door before it was ready.
Yes, I know that the main browser processes don't handle tabs. That wasn't my point. My point about Firefox and Chrome is that those apps also do a substantial amount. Even the main process. Different things than 1PW? Of course, but still a lot. When my browsers are closed, the 1PW process is in the top 3 processes on my laptop taking up memory. If you want to have a constantly running process you need to either:
- Keep the memory footprint low (I would argue under 100MB is reasonable)
- Provide value commiserate with whatever amount of memory you're using (which I would argue you are not doing)
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@jfelchner - there are a number of items that can potentially affect memory usage, so I'm hesitant to assign a "this many vaults/items = that much memory use" assessment to it. For example, I have probably about as many vaults as you do, but nearly triple the number of items, yet my own memory use as reported by Activity Monitor is in the 235-280MB range. That's still considerably less than Slack helper, Google Chrome helper, an email client and a couple of other processes, but it's also less than what you're experiencing for 1Password 7 for Mac. A memory leak would be significant - and something we'd want to fix - but more memory usage isn't by itself indicative of anything in particular. What I'd recommend is that you fully quit 1Password 7 for Mac and restart it, then check memory usage right after startup and continue to check in with it over time -- see if it grows unreasonably. If so, there may be a memory leak.
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Hi @jfelchner ,
I don't want to leave you with the impression that I'm brushing off your concerns. I just want to explain a little bit that 1Password Mini is not just a simple lookup tool. Managing the encryption, securing connections to browsers, background sync, and many other tasks is a fairly big job.
588MB does seem like a lot of memory usage. As lars asked, can you let us know how much RAM it uses on a cold launch (preferrably right after first unlock). It does sound like there is a leak there. We will, of course, investigate that. I'm not seeing anywhere near that amount of usage with more vaults and items than you have.
I also want to stress that we do appreciate the feedback you are providing, and if you can not provide full details on the bugs, that's fine. It just make take us a bit longer to reproduce, but we certainly aren't going to ignore them.
Again, thanks very much for taking the time to provide all of your feedback. We will be looking into it.
Regards,
Kevin0 -
@lars when I completely quit 1PW (using Command-Option-Control and clicking Quit Completely in the menu), then restart, unlock and quit the main app, open and close mini, my memory usage is 86MB, which, if it hung out there, would be totally reasonable. So seems like something is making it jump up.
I definitely wouldn't use a POS like the Slack app as my benchmark for good memory usage though. 😂
@ag_kevin Sounds good.
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@jfelchner - fair enough. If you'd like to send in a diagnostics report, it may help us look into potential memory leaks. Rising from 86 to 588 makes me think that's more likely than 1Password just using too much memory overall.
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