Things Going Wonky? Quick Potential Fix

Any application over time gets a little sideways under the hood, especially those that deal with lots of code or heavy graphics that are constantly changing during the creation/edit process.

So recently I noticed that my current Sparkle project site was behaving oddly, with no explanation and against expected behavior as per the instructions. So I figured that something in the cache folder was the issue, and once I cleared the cache, voila! Problem solved. (My cache folder had over 100MB.)

As of right now, Sparkle doesn’t have a built-in tool to flush it’s own cache, but there’s a super-easy and safe way to do it:

Download the free app, “AppCleaner” from FreeMacSoft. It’s Catalina-ready.

Put the Sparkle app in it’s window and delete ONLY the cache folder itself. (see screenshot) Close AppCleaner and re-open Sparkle. You’ll notice that all your “temp” files like the page thumbnails get rebuilt as you open your project, as well as the old preview files.

While this won’t fix a corrupted project (or not likely) if you’re having strange issues specifically with Sparkle this should clear it up.

And don’t forget, your Mac needs a regular clean-up/tune-up as well. Download and run Onyx for Mac and run all the maintenance routines, run it at least once a month. You’ll have a snappy and smooth-running system to work on.

Cheers.

Those of us who rely on our Macs inbuilt maintenance and never power off our computers would say that we have far fewer problems than those who use third party maintenance programs.

Just to add something here, there are occasional anecdotal reports of some things affecting app performance, it’s hard for us to respond, not having full information. For example iCloud photo library uploads, spotlight indexing or other background activities (a stuck Adobe app in one case we heard), can suddenly stop and be conflated with some “cleaner” activity.

The only effect of clearing sparkle caches is publishing will take more time, as all images need to be regenerated.

The sparkle preferences window does have the option to clear the caches by the way, and in a more granular fashion than cleaner tools.

I strongly discourage deleting application support folders, that will cause republishing and duplicate files on the server.

Finally we are aware of some performance issues. We have already spoken about Sparkle 3, it contains among other things some invisible changes to the architecture, that improve performance and memory use significantly. In fact we have even exposed some macOS bugs that cause Sparkle to get stuck (and worked around them). We wish it was possible to bring those back to 2.8, but unfortunately it’s not possible without significant work, which we believe is better spent making v3 even more awesome.

In the mean time we thank everybody for their patience and understanding, and if things are really bad for you please get in touch via email, and we’ll see what can be done.

3 Likes

@duncan

Is there an ETA for Sparkle 3.0?

We will be announcing it on the mailing list, patience :slight_smile:

2 Likes

@duncan

BTW, I am presently persuading a friend to consider Sparkle and to buy a Pro license. If she should purchase a license just prior to the release of 3.0, would she be entitled to a receive 3.0 for free or at a significant discount?

Good to know about the Pref’s option (never noticed).
Like everyone else I’m on pins and needles about v.3; just joined the mailing list.

Yes this was in our mailing. Any purchase after Jan 1, 2020 is going to get a free upgrade.

2 Likes

I’m very grateful for this @Duncan