AnKing crashes when study by card state

🙋 Support
1

Hi all!

Problem: AnKing deck crashes the entire app and sometimes my laptop when I try to study by card state. This does not happen with any other deck that is local.

Have tried: Restarting app, disabling add-ons, restarting computer, checking database, etc. Basically everything on the Anki troubleshooting

Let me know if there’s anything else that I can try!

2

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3
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This kind of crash is usually due to how heavy the search is on a very large deck like AnKing, rather than AnkiHub/AnKing being “broken” themselves.

A few things to try and some info that will help narrow it down:

1. Confirm the exact action that crashes

When you say “study by card state,” are you:

  • Going to Browse → Search → is:new / is:due / is:suspended, then using Custom Study, or
  • Using Filter / Custom Study → Review cards in a random order / Preview new cards, etc. with a card state filter, or
  • Using another add-on (like “Study By Card State & Tag”)?

If you’re using a specific add-on, the crash may be triggered there, not in the core app. Let us know which menu path you use.

2. Try with a much smaller subset of AnKing

To see if it’s purely a “too many cards” issue:

  1. In Anki, click Browse.
  2. Select your AnKing deck in the left sidebar.
  3. At the top search bar, try something like:
    • deck:AnKing::AnKing Step 1 (or any small subdeck you actually use).
  4. Then try the same study-by-card-state action only on that small subdeck.
  • If this works on a small subdeck but crashes on the full AnKing deck, it’s almost certainly a performance/memory problem with the huge deck.
  • If it still crashes on a very small subdeck (a few hundred cards), that suggests corruption or a bug.

3. Temporarily reduce load on AnKing

A few ideas that often help with large shared decks:

  • Turn off the add-ons again, but this time restart Anki twice
    Some add-ons only unload properly after a second restart.

  • Create a filtered deck instead of “Study by card state” directly
    For example:

    1. Tools → Create Filtered Deck
    2. Search: deck:"AnKing" plus your state filter, e.g. is:due or is:new.
    3. Limit to 500–2000 cards.
    4. See if building that filtered deck crashes.

  • Split the deck temporarily
    If you have all AnKing subdecks under one massive parent, try moving subdecks to separate top-level decks and only operate on one at a time.

4. Check for AnKing-specific issues

Because AnKing is huge and heavily tagged, it can hit edge cases others decks don’t:

  • In Browse, run Check Database again after disabling all add-ons (just to be sure).
  • Check how large AnKing is:
    • Number of notes and cards for AnKing vs your other decks.
    • How much RAM your system has (8 GB vs 16+ GB matters with giant searches).

If you’re comfortable sharing, please reply with:

  • Anki version (from Help → About).
  • OS (Windows / macOS / Linux, and version).
  • Rough size of the AnKing deck (cards or notes).
  • Exactly which steps you click right before the crash (menu names).
  • Whether you use any “study by card state” add-on.

5. AnkiHub / AnKing angle

AnkiHub sync/updates themselves shouldn’t cause this crash, but the synced AnKing deck can become huge over time as you add personal cards, keep unsuspended content, etc. Sometimes users solve this by:

  • Archiving or suspending large unused sections of AnKing before doing heavy “card state” operations.
  • Creating a new profile and importing a fresh AnKing+AnkiHub setup to test if the crash is profile-specific.

If you’re willing to test that: create a new Anki profile, install only AnkiHub and AnKing there, sync AnkiHub, and try the same “study by card state” workflow. If it doesn’t crash in the new profile, your old profile is likely corrupted or just over-burdened.

If you can share the details in step 4, I can suggest a more precise workflow (e.g., a safe search query or a filtered-deck setup) that’s less likely to crash Anki with AnKing’s size.

4

Hello,

Could you please specify your steps for “study by card state”? I’m not exactly sure what you are referring to. If you could provide the exact steps to reproduce the issue, It would help us understand it better! :blush:

5

Hi Marcos!

For the AnKing Deck, I will click the deck in the home page. Then clock the “Custom Study button”. I will then click “Study by card State”. I usually do “All review cards in a random order” after selecting 100 cards from the deck. After that it starts to load then proceeds to crash the app and sometimes my laptop. Let me know if there’s any other information you need!

Dana

6

Hello,

I cannot reproduce this issue, and I suspect it is related to your machine. Because there are thousands of cards in the deck, it may be taking too much processing power to complete this operation. Since the AnKing deck is essentially the same as any other deck (aside from the high card count) and this is a core Anki feature, I recommend reaching out to the Anki forums to report the issue: Anki - Anki Forums

In the meantime, you can try creating a filtered deck instead of using custom study:

  1. Go to Tools > Create Filtered Deck.
  2. Enter this in the search field: “deck:AnKing Step Deck” is:review
  3. Adjust the settings as you like.

Under the hood, custom study is just a filtered deck with a premade configuration. Creating a filtered deck manually is basically the same thing but gives you more control. This may be more stable and might prevent Anki from freezing.