DocFetcher Pro 1.14 Release

DocFetcher Pro 1.14 has just been released. It’s been about two months since the previous release, and since then a grab bag of fixes and changes had accumulated. All in all, three bugs have been fixed, and the various changes mostly revolve around preventing more bugs and crashes. The most notable changes are as follows:

1) It turns out that some programs, such as Thunderbird, like using files without file extension as gigantic data dumps, e.g., “Trash” or “Trash-1”. These files can often be 1 GB or more in size. However, DocFetcher Pro will by default try to index files without file extension as plain text files, and will likely fall over and die if it runs into these gigantic files. To prevent this, there’s now a new setting on the indexing dialog that by default will make the program exclude files having no file extension and being bigger than a certain file size from indexing. (And if you’re wondering why this new file size limit is applied only to files without file extension, and not to all files, that’s because a reasonable value for the file size limit depends on the file type. For instance, Excel files may reasonably be capped at, say, 100 MB, while PST files should be allowed to be 2 GB in size or more. A file-type-dependent file size limit may be added in a future major release.)

2) In case of a fatal indexing crash, the program now reports the path of the last file it worked on. This helps locate the file that likely caused the crash.

3) Previously, indexes that could not be loaded due to a broken tree.xml file in them were silently ignored. Now such index loading failures will be reported at startup. This helps you with identifying and removing broken indexes that are uselessly occupying disk space.

4) Result table: For emails, the value in the size column now includes not only the email body size, but also the size of any attachments. Note that you must rebuild your indexes before this new size value is displayed.

For the full list of fixes and changes, please see the changelog.


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DocFetcher Pro 1.13 Release

DocFetcher Pro 1.13 has just been released.

The bundled Java runtime has been downgraded from Java 16 to Java 11 due to some reports of stability issues. – Apparently, it’s unwise to live on the bleeding edge of Java technology. The downgrade has virtually no impact on performance: In the previously discussed benchmark, going from Java 16 to Java 11 results in only about 100 ms of additional index loading time.

In addition to the Java runtime downgrade, this release fixes a handful of crashes and some other issues. For details, see the changelog.


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DocFetcher Pro 1.12 Release: Java Downgrade

Yesterday’s release of DocFetcher Pro 1.12 brought an upgrade of the bundled Java runtime from Java 8 to Java 16. Since then, there have been reports of macOS users being unable to launch the new 1.12 release, specifically users running macOS 11.3 and 11.4.

The likely reason for this launch issue is an incompatibility between the latest macOS versions and Java 16, and downgrading to Java 11 seems to resolve the problem. Therefore, the DocFetcher Pro 1.12 release files for macOS have been replaced on Gumroad. They have the same filenames as before, but now come bundled with Java 11. Give these new files a try if you experienced the 1.12 launch issue. The release files for Windows and Linux remain unchanged, if you’ve bought any of those.

In terms of performance, there’s virtually no difference between Java 11 and Java 16. Specifically, these are the measured index loading times with the benchmark from the previous post:

  • DocFetcher Pro 1.11 + Java 8: 63.048 s (100%)
  • DocFetcher Pro 1.12 + Java 8: 15.316 s (24%)
  • DocFetcher Pro 1.12 + Java 11: 8.824 s (14%)
  • DocFetcher Pro 1.12 + Java 16: 8.726 s (14%)

As you can see from the figures, the downgrade from Java 16 to Java 11 results in an increase of index loading time by a measly 100 ms, which may very well be a statistical fluke. As before, all load times are averages over 10 test runs each.


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