Zotero slow and freezing

mlasecke

I am working on my dissertation and using Zotero. For the last couple of weeks, my Zotero has been incredibly slow to add citations to my document and it ends up freezing every single time. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling Zotero but this did not help. Please advise.

dstillman

Is this a Mac? In a large document, particularly in Word for Mac, refreshing may just take a very long time. You should make sure "Automatically update citations" is disabled, and then only refresh when you're done (or a few times before then at times when you're able to let it go for a while, just to make sure there are no surprises when you're ready to submit).

mlasecke

Hi! It is a mac and I am using Zotero on google docs not word. I don't hit the refresh button often, I am just trying to insert intext citations and it just shows the loading bar endlessly after I hit "enter" to insert them. I end up having to close out of my document and close zotero because my whole document freezes with the zotero bar loading as it tries to insert a citation. When I re-open the document, the document takes a while to open (not normal) but the citation is there. Any advice?

dstillman

Google Docs can also be slow with big documents. So again, you should disable "Automatically update citations" to start.

How many citations and how long are you waiting? You can go to Help → Debug Output Logging → View Output and see if anything is being logged, which can tell you whether it's doing anything.

mlasecke

I disabled "Automatically update citations" and this seems to be helping, thank you!

dstillman

Note that a Refresh will still take a while, so the same advice as above applies — you should still refresh every so often when you're able to leave it for a while just to make sure it's still able to finish and to get a sense of how long it takes before you're on deadline.

M.Umer

The last two updates have made the Zotero much slower to respond, I hope future updates fix this.

dstillman

@M.Umer: No, there've been no recent changes to integration performance. If you've been working in a given document, it may slow down the more citations you have.