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Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

The opaqueness is definitely a problem. My iMessage database has a corrupted spot somewhere in the message history; if I accidentally make the Messages app read that spot (via searching or scrolling back through old conversations) it'll silently start maxing out the CPU and burning energy for no reason. There is no error message, nothing obviously wrong-looking, and as far as I know everything works.

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Oh, so that's what's happening? You made me realise I have the same exact issue!

Well I can't for sure prove it's indeed DB corruption, but I don't have many other theories.

It's unlikely to be a "static" bug affecting everyone because it would've been caught in QA and/or user reports and fixed already (this is not a new issue, been happening for a year at least).

Therefore my hypothesis is that it's dependent on corrupt persistent data that a relative minority of users have which is not easy for Apple to detect/replicate.

Hey, this sounds like an interesting problem. I am always looking for edge cases to test, if you have time would you mind checking if https://github.com/ReagentX/imessage-exporter works for you and if it crashes in that spot?

Holy crap. I've been looking for ways to archive my imessages somehow. imessage-exporter looks like exactly what I wanted. What a cool project!

Cheers! It was fun to build.

Sounds like a nightmare. Do you know what could have caused the database corruption?

Couple years of macOS/iOS reinstalls along with the typical shittiness of iCloud and the iMessage clients. I would be more surprised if it wasn't corrupt.

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