Troubleshooting

We are sorry that you are here. 🙁 Fingers crossed it won’t be for long?

If all else fails, you can try asking for help—see the Community links in this page’s footer.

Common Issues

Server won’t start

  • Check if port 4433 (or whatever was configured instead) is already in use
  • Verify the configuration file syntax

Web interface loads, but looks broken

If the main text loads, but seems jumbled up, and (most) images don’t load, check that the base_url is correct in the server’s config. (Trailing slashes should be irrelevant, but you can try fiddling with them in the config and/or the browser’s address bar; please file a bug report if this fixes the issue.)

Extension not connecting

  • Ensure your Hister server is running and up to date
  • Verify the extension is configured with the correct server URL (should be the same as base_url in the server’s config)
  • Check browser console for errors (also, see below for debugging the extension itself)
  • Check firewall settings

Browser import fails

  • Ensure your Hister server is running and up to date

Memory Management

If Hister is consuming too much memory, especially with large browsing histories or many indexed documents, you can reduce memory usage by disabling language detection.

Reducing Memory Usage

Set detect_languages: false in the indexer section of your configuration file:

indexer:
  detect_languages: false

This setting disables automatic language detection for indexed pages, which reduces memory consumption by using a single default analyzer instead of maintaining separate language-specific indexes. This comes at the cost of potentially less accurate search results.

Important: After changing this setting, you must run a full reindex:

hister reindex

The reindex operation will rebuild all indexes according to the new setting, compacting your existing data to a single index.

Debugging the Web Extension

The Web extension’s logs will not be visible in the default browser console. Instead:

Firefox

  1. Go to about:debugging#/runtime/this-firefox
  2. Press the “Inspect” button to the right of “Hister”.