One of the things I despise about Windows is how much time developers have to spend working around problems in third-party firewall and anti-virus software.
Case in point: I’m seeing quite a few error reports about the new FeedDemon 3.0 beta that are caused by AV software locking files that FeedDemon is trying to access. Many AV programs monitor the file system for changed files, and when they find one, they scan it for viruses – temporarily locking it in the process. This has always been a problem, but it’s now an even bigger problem since FeedDemon stores your feed content in a single SQLite database file. Every time that database file changes, your AV software scans it to make sure it’s not infected.
In some cases this causes file permission errors when FeedDemon tries to access its database, but more often than not it simply slows FeedDemon down since it has to wait for the file lock to be released.
Most people report that the new FeedDemon is a lot faster than previous versions, so if you’re finding it slower, chances are your AV software is the culprit.
The good news is that you can probably stop this from happening. FeedDemon’s database uses the file extension .FDB, so if your AV software has an “exclusions” list, try adding the file extension .FDB to it. If you can’t do that, see if you can add FeedDemon’s cache folder (File | Manage Cache) to its list of excluded folders. Several customers who have done this have reported dramatic speed increases.
Of course, I can’t expect every FeedDemon customer to do this, so I’m looking into ways to work around these issues. But in the meantime, give it a shot, and reply here if it makes a difference.