Postman very verrrrrry slow start

[nglro]

Is there an existing issue for this?

• [X] I have searched the tracker for existing similar issues and I know that duplicates will be closed

Describe the Issue

Just installed the latest version available ( Postman-win64-9.24.2-Setup ) and the app is not started after ~30 minutes. I uninstalled, deleted user local and roaming folders, re-downloaded, installed again. The previous version was slow too, but this is just unusable.

My system is a Win11 Home, i7 gen 11 with GB ram and 2TB M2 SSD. I would expect to be able to launch an app like postman in the same day I click the icon.

Steps To Reproduce

Install postman, try to open it.

Screenshots or Videos

this is all i get after ~30 minutes after starting it, no button in the menu works

Operating System

Windows 11 Home Edition

Postman Version

9.24.2

Postman Platform

Postman App

Additional Context?

I had a previous Postman installed that worked, not sure what the version was though, I didn't thought to check before updating.

[jviotti]

@nglro This is very strange. Does the app actually render after those 30 minutes?

[kamalaknn]

@nglro Could you share the logs from View -> Developer -> View logs in Explorer to us at help@postman.com?

[nglro]

@nglro This is very strange. Does the app actually render after those 30 minutes?

No, that's when I got frustrated enough to make this post and close it from Task Manager.

@nglro Could you share the logs from View -> Developer -> View logs in Explorer to us at help@postman.com?

None of the buttons responded when I clicked them, so I uninstalled the app. I can install it again and search for the folders where the logs are saved if you can tell me the path

[kamalaknn]

@nglro You can find the logs under ${user directory}/AppData/Roaming/Postman/logs directory.

[nglro]

I see there is a new version available today ( Postman-win64-9.25.2-Setup.exe ). I installed that as I don't have the one from yesterday anymore.

This one took about 5 minutes to show the login screen, clicked login, app disappeared, appeared after ~4 minutes saying to check browser, I entered token manually as it didn't seem to receive it or be able to process it

I attached the logs and 3 screenshots of the app's appearance after login. The changes are about 2 and 5 minutes apart. App doesn't seem to change from the last screenshot but constantly uses 20% CPU and memory usage slowly increases.

logs.zip

.

[ikellenberger]

Maybe about the same here: 9.28.2 on WIN10, 16 GB, i7 I've noticed that Task Manager shows 'Host for Endpoint Security' is going through the roof when Postman is starting up... After about a minute and Postman has completely loaded, CPU load is going down again. As Host for Endpoint Security is part of Bitdefender anti virus protection, I am not really sure, if Postman can positively influence this...

[nglro]

this is an awesome find. I am also using BitDefender and I have tested after reading your post and can confirm, if I turn off the antivirus Postman starts as one would expect, with the antivirus turned on it takes minutes to show a blank white screen that never loads.

So this late versions of Postman must be triggering something that the antivirus find to be threatening and maybe blocks some services needed to start up. I am using BitDefender and Postman for years, and at some point they used to work together.

It is not a fix, but should at least help reproducing the issue.

[RaisinTen]

This might be happening because of the way in which we sign the app. I'm working on a fix for this now, will keep y'all updated on how it goes!

[kvigor]

I also have Bitdefender and I'm experiencing the same issue. When I disable Bitdefender Postman loads right up. I even added Postman as a safe app, Bitdefender still sees something and is blocking something.

Something is off here.

[arnoudsietsema]

I am also experiencing this issue. Postman was working fine before I installed Bitdefender, but now it takes quite a long time to start Postman. During startup the Bitdefender Endpoint Security Service process is using max CPU.

[Pkura]

I'v got the same issue, on first "fresh" start, after that it is starting normally.

[zchristianl]

I use BitDefender and was able to reproduce this.

While it takes an incredibly long time to install Postman with this bug, it does, in fact, install and can be opened with great patience. The bdservicehost process can jump to (and will likely stay at) 100% CPU utilization while Postman is installing and trying to open.

The slowest part is when Postman tries to load the sign in screen, about 8-15 minutes. I also had to manually copy & paste the authorization callback once I was able to sign in.

Once I signed in to Postman, I was able to open the app within 2-5 minutes. CPU utilization will drop back down once it’s fully loaded & and everything should work normally from there.

I would not recommend adding Postman as an exception in BitDefender for general security reasons. (I also did not see any performance improvements when testing this.)

[RaisinTen]

Does this repro with any other electron app or is it just Postman that is affected by this?

[RaisinTen]

I'm also wondering if y'all get any message from BitDefender of this sort - https://github.com/electron/rcedit/issues/75#issue-322898004.

[zchristianl]

Personally, I've never had an issue with BitDefender and other electron-based apps (Spotify, VS Code, Discord, etc.)

I'm also wondering if y'all get any message from BitDefender of this sort - electron/rcedit#75 (comment).

And I have not seen any messages like that when running Postman.

[sloapport]

I'm having the same issue on startup, but I'm not seeing any message from BitDefender. If I open up the log, the only Postman-related entry is

A program has been allowed to connect to the Internet.Process path C:\Users\slo\AppData\Local\Postman\app-10.10.3\Postman.exe. Protocol UDP (17). Port 443

[RaisinTen]

Does this also happen when you're offline and you launch the app? I'm trying to verify if sending outbound requests during start up has anything to do with this.

[sloapport]

I'm not entirely sure. I'm not able to reproduce the issue at will. It seems like BitDefender caches its rules for some time, and that this cache persists through reboots.

This might be why I only experience the issue some times. I don't use Postman every day.

Half an hour ago I experienced the issue, decided to do a Google search and ended up here. Having just rebooted and disabled all networking, launched right up. Rebooting again and enabling networking, postman launched right up again.

[zchristianl]

If I drop the network connection on my PC and open Postman, it's still slow to start. I tested this a couple times by fully restarting my PC and trying to open Postman.

Oddly enough, if I open Postman, wait for it to load, close it and then open it a short time later, it loads immediately.

[riquems]

Sophos antivirus also seems to go crazy on postman

This is while I'm using Postman, the cpu usage keeps stacking up:

As soon as I close it, it goes to 0% cpu usage

It's so unfortunate because I like Postman, but it slows my machine so much, and I have an i5-8365U @1.6Ghz (goes up to 3GHz) and 24gb RAM. Hope this gets fixed...

[kvigor]

BitDefender is one of the top 3 virus and malware detectors in the world. Whatever the Romanians are doing it's good. So I hope this is resolved on the Postman side.

Best of Luck Postman.

[froozeify]

I had the same issue with postman taking a really long time to startup.

I've uninstall Bitdefender (for apparently a better antivirus) and now postman start instantly (and I don't have any more cpu spike caused by bitdefender)

[DarthSonic]

Same issue for me. Any solutions yet?

[RaisinTen]

No solutions (other than turning off BitDefender) yet but I wonder if this happens because the postman app tries to use a file that isn't signed properly. I've tried checking it myself (using signtool verify) and I haven't found such a file yet. I wonder if anyone of you have any clue. Can someone double check please?

[nratcliff]

I've been having this same problem and I didn't realize BitDefender was the cause until I found this issue.

I've been able to get around this by putting in an exclusion for Postman.

Open BitDefender. Go to Protection -> Advanced Threat Defense -> Settings -> Manage Exceptions

I added the Postman exe file and excluded it from all of the protection options.

Now Postman opens quickly like it used to.

More of a workaround than solution because excluding apps defeats the purpose of having BitDefender installed in the first place, but in the meantime this has reduced my frustration with using Postman and hopefully it can do the same for others.

[jviotti]

Thanks a lot for the confirmation. It is interesting that whitelisting the binary was enough. I thought the related static resources on the app would be triggering the most alerts given their size.

@nratcliff Can you confirm what is the size of the binary at C:\Users\Nathan\AppData\Local\Postman\postman.exe? I want to confirm whether this is the key application entry point or the auto-update proxy binary.

[nratcliff]

@jviotti 366KB

I don't see any alerts in BitDefender. I didn't realize it was the cause until I found this issue. Don't know if version matters, I'm running the free version of BitDefender. Paid versions may have more functionality.

[jviotti]

Thanks @nratcliff ! This is very helpful!

[RaisinTen]

Can someone please uninstall Bitdefender Total Security and install the 2023 version and let me know if this issue is still reproducible?

[Hezer]

@RaisinTen I'm running the latest build of Bitdefender (26.0.35.174) and the latest release of Postman (10.13.5) on Windows 10 (build: 19045.2846). And unfortunately I can confirm that this issue still persists.

It takes minutes to open up postman, unless I disable real-time protection on Bitdefender. But it will eventually open and after that I'm able to use Postman normally.

[hjr2000]

Whoaaa, I just updated Postman to 10.14 and I now cannot get Postman to open sloooooooowly.

However, I do recall that on occasion, if memory serves, that the problem didn't always happen every time - so I may just be lucky! I did restart my PC after upgrading Postman too - and it opens fine. For now.

I can't see anything in the changelog about a fix for a slow opening problem for BitDefender customers though.

BTW my BitDefender version is 26.0.36.193 and is Bitdefender Antivirus Plus.

[Hezer]

Can also confirm it's now opening much faster on Bitdefender 27.0.16.86 and Postman 10.17.0.

[DarthSonic]

Can also confirm it's now opening much faster on Bitdefender 27.0.16.86 and Postman 10.17.0.

Faster yes. But still way slower than any other application.

[arnoudsietsema]

Postman is indeed starting nice and fast now (v10.16.9). Takes seconds where it used to take minutes.

[alessiomeloni]

Same problem, Kaspersky

[AvadhootT]

It is taking a long time to open the app

[kamalaknn]

Hey @AvadhootT, this should not be happening. How often do you experience issues like these, and how long does it usually take to finish loading?

Could you help us with the application logs from View -> Developer -> View logs in Explorer and send them over to help@postman.com so we can take a deeper look?

[ThomasCollignon]

In case it helps: I've also reproduced this issue with Insomnia (a Postman competitor ?). Deactivating Bitdefender Shield before starting up Insomnia also makes it start way faster.