I have been looking at open-source (and free) Gramps (runs on Linux, Windows, and Mac). I imported a GEDCOM with 5000 people. It does have data cleanup tools similar to RM, and many more. It will take me awhile to explore all of them and figure out how incorporate it into my workflows, and get changes up to Ancestry without creating new trees (unlike RM, there is no equivalent of TreeSync).
It is very modular, most features are implemented as ‘plugins’ that you can turn on or off, and there are dozens of others you can install. And if you know Python, you can write your own, or contribute to the main project (they seem to do releases every 9 months or so). Don’t like SQLite? Ok, use PostgreSQL.
It doesn’t seem to have concept of ‘web hints’ or ability to sync to online services. And there’s not much hand-holding. It did crash once, after completing a couple of hours long task called ‘Merge Citations…’ (it found 60k of these!). It gave me reference errors to media files stored in iCloud, but which weren’t downloaded (after I downloaded there were 3 or 4 actual reference errors).
But I also want to try setting up VirtualBox with Catalina so I can at least be able to run RM7 on my Mac. And maybe RM8 will be happier with it? One can wish.
Did a fresh clean install of RM8 and then went through the settings panes. This generated 3 AV crashes (all reported) and lost all settings changes. I got around this by opening a file, changing one settings pane, clicking on People and then File and closing the file. Next reopened the file and did the next pane. This saved each pane and avoid AVs. I did get another 2 AVs in using the file but do not remember the specifics. If everyone reports their AVs tech support should have thousands of reports and see some causal patterns. However they seem to feel that this is a rare issue for just a few mac users (sigh).
I thought I’d give RM8 a try on my M1 MacBook Air. Unfortunately I get identical AVEs issues on it as on my iMac (Intel). I haven’t yet set up my VirtualBox+Catalina experiment.
I’m guessing that smaller trees without much media will work okay, at least it seems that way for me. But the 3 trees I actively work on exceed whatever limit this effectively is.
I use the latest version of RM 8 on my intel-based Macbook Pro running macOS Monterrey (version 12.5). I frequently ( once a day) have been getting access message errors like others. It generally happens if I use tree share to update my database from Ancestry. I always click on report issue and log off. This is not a unique problem to only a few users. My only conclusion is that the RM8 software is deeply flawed, It would be understandable if this were a beta version and we were still testing it. This is very frustrating and has caused me to explore Heredis and FTM. I keep returning to RM8 because of how the program’s previous versions operated and with hope (forlorn hope?) that Bruse and his team will hire outside programmers who can get to the bottom of the problems and redesign RM8 so that it functions smoothly and more like other apps on my Mac.
And now I have: so far, no AVE’s. I was able to download the tree that consistently caused Ancestry to terminate the login.
I don’t think it would be any different with Monterrey in the VM. I only gave the VM 4 CPUs to work with, and the download progress was much slower than the (failed) download attempts just running normally. So it seems ‘speed kills’.
It’s not really an acceptable workaround (at least out of the box, the VM doesn’t work with trackpad gestures, & I need to figure out how to configure it so display is larger). But it is another data point that might be useful in deriving a solution to the root cause.
And I think most people would be challenged to set up VB, prepare the macOS installer disk, etc. I had to piece the ‘how to’ together from several web sources.
My next experiment was to install Charles proxy and use it to throttle bandwidth to ancestry.com (if you have Homebrew installed, it’s just brew install charles).
Currently, it’s set to simulate 2 Mbps ASDL (2048 download, 512 upload). And Download, TreeSync work with all of my trees, no AVE’s. It is slow, obviously. But at least it works. And most likely faster speeds will work too (looks like 8 Mbps is working so far).
Since this has been my blocker until now, it’s not yet clear that there won’t be more AVE’s to come, as I keep kicking RM8’s tires.
And I can dispense with the VirtualBox ‘solution’ and its several tradeoffs.
Update: It’s working with 16 Mbps down, 1024 Kbps up. And for a more permanent workaround (Charles trial only allows 30m sessions for 30 days, and $50 to license), I’ll probably use Network Link Conditioner (in Additional Tools for Xcode; it installs in Preferences).
And yes, I got an AVE a little earlier, just trying to create a new tree (and before connection to Ancestry). So there’s that.
If I can at least clean up some issues and sync them back to Ancestry, I think that will be enough for now.
How does your internet connection speed show this? The old lady that runs our local Family History Center only has a DSL connection with 1Mbps down and far less than that up and she can manage to upload a file just fine. I know her file is much bigger than yours, and it takes a while, but she manages it. It sounds to me more like you had issues with hardware on your side, whether it be computer, router, modem, cables or what not.
It’s not hardware or networking or, strictly speaking, a timeout issue. The login is terminated due to ‘too many keep alive’ requests from the RM8/Mac’s networking library (not sure where I was seeing these log messages).
If I limit upload speed to 2mbps, all of my (main) trees download without error. And my largest tree dies at 3 mbps. I have one baby tree (500 records), and that one never gave an error.
Once downloaded, this threshold might be higher, as the session is not nearly as lengthy (no media to download, etc). But I haven’t had a chance to verify this. There is some limit, as I was getting errors just with TreeShare sync.
Since Windows is not having this problem at all, AFAICT, it’s some behavior specific to RM8/Mac.
I tried to use Charles to see what the traffic looked like, but couldn’t see any ancestry.com activity. Maybe it goes through an intermediate host.
slow dsl works if no media. fast fiber works with media so upload speed is a key factor. Others have indicated RM8 bothers the ancestry servers too often and gets dumped like a noisy child.
Trust me, the old lady that I mention, she has media in abundance and it works on her slow connection. I also can pretty much assure you that whatever communication that takes place between RM and Ancestry is done according to the allowed specs given by Ancestry. If RM was hitting the Ancestry servers to fast and too hard, Ancestry would probably cut off RM’s access. Since many people, including Mac users can seem to upload…that goes right back to issues with your setup specifically.
Yep, and you changed one variable and look what happened. Turns out it was your connection. Hence, your problem. If it were a RM problem, then everyone with a slow connection would have your issues…but they don’t.
Again, that proves the problem was on your side…because NO, many others aren’t having the problem. You and maybe two others by my count. Out of the tens of thousands of RM users one would expect at least several thousand people would be having issues of which at least a few hundred would be in here griping about it.
Just for giggles, I throttled my connection down to 512Kbps and managed to do a new Treeshare with 43352 persons and 5251 media items. It took about 2.5 hours, but it managed to complete.
I will agree that RM8 has many problems, however not the ones that you insist on attributing to it.
You mean that RM is the only app that YOU KNOW OF that fails with a slow internet connection.
There is a small number of message board users (mainly you and one or two others) that keep complaining about RM/mac issues compared to the total number of users. My guess is that the folks at RM are doing their best to keep the vast majority of their customers happy by resolving RM/Windows issues and adding missing functionality to the product before trying to fix issues with the minority. Classic Pareto analysis that we all learned in our Business classes.
I’m pretty sure that I never mentioned which platform I used, and I don’t recall @kfunk doing so. As for Rooty, he’s constantly throwing terms like “Windows Hell” and “Intel Room Heater” among others into an otherwise civil discourse.
I, also, have not denigrated either the mac or Windows platforms.
Discussions should be limited to RM functionality and not OS superiority.
