Zotero has the worst memory leakage

aloshbau
edited May 12, 2023
I use Zotero on MacOS Monterey and the Zotero app has the worst memory leakage of any program. Immediately upon opening it, RAM usage is 1.2 GB. Within a couple minutes of reading my PDF, RAM usage is up to >2 GB. Closing all PDFs only drops the RAM usage down to 1.8 GB. And of course, the program isn't much use if I'm not reading PDFs.

I just opened my one PDF back up so I can read it, and RAM usage jumped up to 2.4 GB. For reference, the actual size of the PDF is 2.9 **MB**. Also for reference, I have dozens of Chrome tabs open and Chrome is only using 700 MB RAM.

Zotero devs, any chance you could fix the memory leakage?
  • poettli
    Do you open OCRed PDFs?

    https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/432229/#Comment_432229
  • aloshbau
    > Do you open OCRed PDFs

    Yes, because 100% of papers I download from peer-reviewed scientific journals are OCR. It's not an option for me to not have OCR PDFs.
  • dstillman
    edited May 12, 2023
    No, the issue would be PDFs with large scanned images — whether they're OCRed or not is irrelevant. (And most modern published papers neither have large scanned images nor are OCRed — they're just generated.)

    Anyway, Zotero 7, which will be in beta soon, has an updated PDF reader and should have roughly equivalent memory usage to the Firefox PDF reader. (But PDFs with large scanned images will still use more memory than other PDFs.)
  • poettli
    Yes, I forgot to talk about large scanned images. My bad
  • aloshbau
    > (And most modern published papers neither have large scanned images nor are OCRed — they're just generated.)

    Yes, that makes sense. Wasn't sure what the term was, but yeah they are generated such that the characters are highlightable.

    > large scanned images

    Yeah, none of the papers I'm reading have large scanned images, but they do have vector or non-vector figures (bar charts, dot plots, etc)

    > Zotero 7, which will be in beta soon

    Great! I can't wait to try it :)
  • zmetedinler
    Umarım zotero 7'de daha az kaynak kullanan ve zotero 6 da yaşanan donma, yavaşlama gibi süreçleri yaşatmayacak bir zotero olmasını diliyorum.
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