Up to this morning I was experiencing extreme slowness of GW in switching to the Alerts tab if there were any new alerts (causing Windows alerts that GW was not responding). Recently I mentioned this to @Ken_GlassWire, who helpfully intimated that it might be because I’d got a particularly long history list there and it was taking time to read the entries. A few tests at that time pointed to that indeed being the case. This morning I belatedly thought to see if there was any option in Settings to limit the length of the history. I couldn’t find that option, but at least did then find a ‘Clear History’ button, with a choice of how much history, if any, to keep. As I didn’t really need a long history there for normal purposes, I cleared all but the last week’s worth.
This afternoon, on starting up the computer and getting another pair of alerts, I opened the GW window and switched to the Alerts tab, and it was virtually instantaneous, without discernable delay at all, and no second delay when the ‘Mark as read’ button was clicked. I haven’t had it that snappy probably for a year or more.
I’m therefore fully satisfied that a long history was the cause of the tiresome delays, and theoretically I could keep it like that by keeping on clearing the history older than 1 week. However, that task would soon get forgotten till delays start occurring again, and in any case is an extra task for me to keep doing, which would not be ideal.
So, it would be very helpful to have a user option for automatic daily or once-per-session clearance of all history entries older than a user-specified period. That way, each user could choose his / her own best compromise between the possible usefulness of the long history and speed of operation of the GW window when the Alerts tab is clicked.