Very slow ingest process. Web interface not responding.

[jovigom]

Hello!

I have installed Calibre-Web Automated in a container within NAS Synology DS224+ with Portainer according to the guide https://mariushosting.com/how-to-install-calibre-web-automated-on-your-synology-nas/

The ingest process is very slow and often crashes, even causing the web interface to freeze.

Is there anything I can check or change to improve this behavior? Thank you.

[mikebel3]

You mentioned in a different post having 120k books. Are you trying to ingest them all at once? How much RAM does your NAS have?

You can check the portainer log for any memory error messages. The container may be stretching the limits of your device if it doesn't have enough memory.

The ingest folder is meant to handle incremental additions (a few books here and there) not to create your initial library. It would be better to install calibre on a more powerful desktop computer and process there and then place that library into the cwa folders on your nas.

[raviwarrier]

I ingest 3-6 books at a time and it still is slow. eventually, sometimes, it crashes. as I write, I have a 504 error on the CWA site. :) Logs don't show anything wrong:

[calibre-web-automated] 2026-03-17T07:20:05.940773056Z 
[calibre-web-automated] 2026-03-17T07:20:05.940784575Z [ingest-processor]: START_CON: Converting [BOOKNAME REDACTED] - [AUTHOR REDACTED].pdf...
[calibre-web-automated] 2026-03-17T07:20:05.940796630Z 
[calibre-web-automated] 2026-03-17T07:20:07.599932963Z 1% Converting input to HTML...
[calibre-web-automated] 2026-03-17T07:20:07.600038388Z InputFormatPlugin: PDF Input running
[calibre-web-automated] 2026-03-17T07:20:07.600231608Z on /cwa-book-ingest/[FILENAME REDACTED].pdf
[calibre-web-automated] 2026-03-17T07:20:28.854136592Z [2026-03-17 12:50:28,853]  INFO {scholarly:96} Getting https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=TheXXXXREDACTED&as_vis=0&as_sdt=0,33
[calibre-web-automated] 2026-03-17T07:20:28.881797237Z [2026-03-17 12:50:28,881]  WARN {cps.metadata_provider.amazon:184} HTTPSConnectionPool(host='www.amazon.com', port=443): Max retries exceeded with url: /s?unfiltered=1&sort=relevanceexprank&search-alias=stripbooks&i=digital-text&field-keywords=REDACTED (Caused by NewConnectionError("HTTPSConnection(host='www.amazon.com', port=443): Failed to establish a new connection: [Errno 111] Connection refused"))
[calibre-web-automated] 2026-03-17T07:20:31.826896254Z [2026-03-17 12:50:31,826]  INFO {httpx:1025} HTTP Request: GET https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=REDACTED&as_vis=0&as_sdt=0,33 "HTTP/1.1 200 OK"
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[kanjieater]

Just now running into this too. Only added a few books, but have a collection of a few thousand. Does it ever recover or do you have to force restart after an ingestion?

[raviwarrier]

I had to restart my container. And once or twice, it was so bad, that I had to reboot my raspberry pi.

I uninstalled it after a couple of days of trying.

[kanjieater]

yup had to restart. I've filed a formal bug on the issue tracker, which probably was the better place to report this than discussions. #1256

[jovigom]

I’d like to thank you for the project, but because of this issue I got fed up and uninstalled everything from my Synology NAS. I’m now continuing to use the Calibre app on my computer; there’s no comparison when it comes to speed when adding books, especially when you have thousands of them.

[raviwarrier]

Ditto! I just maintain the ebooks library on my laptop.

[recruiterguy]

I recently just spent a few days setting up CWA on my 920+ and found the same issue. It seems that when there is any type of significant conversions or work being done by the app the UI completely grinds to a crawl if the container even manages not to lock up and require a restart.
The only solution I've come up with so far is to just be patient and manage a lot of the initial heavy lifting of the setups through my Portainer console. I love this app and hope that the dev work continues - just jumped in here looking for a few bug fixes and roadmap details. :-)

[kanjieater]

Recommend using the fork posted in my issue above. At this point this is abandoned vibeware

[recruiterguy]

sorry, link to issue? Not finding it.

[kanjieater]

#1256

[recruiterguy]

Thank you, sir.