Zotero is slow

haraldkliems

I'm having quite serious issues with Zotero's speed. Any kind of Zotero operation, be it grabbing metadata, moving between collections or sometimes even only toggling the Zotero pane on and off creates substantial lag of several seconds. I have no idea what causes these issues -- my computer is not terribly old and overall Firefox works just fine. My suspicion is that there might be an issue with one of the many other FF add-ons that I've installed or maybe the large number of indexed pdfs. But this is just a wild guess.

How do I figure out what exactly is slowing Zotero down so much?

Some background info:

Windows 7, 2 GB RAM, Intel Core 2 Duo T 7300 2 GHz, 32 bit

Index stats: 837 indexed, 207000 words
984 items in library

Installed FF add-ons:
Adblock Plus 1.1.3
BugMeNot 2.2
CookieSafe 3.0.5
Customize Google 0.76
Deutsches Woerterbuch 2.0
DownThemAll! 1.1.7
FireFTP 1.0.7
Forecastfox 0.9.10.1
Hide Menubar 1.0.20091221
Link Alert 0.9
Linkification 1.3.7
Nightly Tester Tools 2.0.3
Sage 1.4.3
US English Dictionary 4.0.0
Yet Another Smooth Scrolling 2.0.25
Zotero 2.0b7.6
Zotero OpenOffice Integration 3.015

adamsmith

very hard to say - about the "toggling the Zotero bar" - the first time you do that after starting FF always takes a while. But every subsequent try should be immediate - and it is for my almost identical library on a two year old laptop.

It could be something going on with the add ons - to test the general idea, why don't you deactivate all of them except the Zotero ones, restart FF and see if that helps.

Alternatively, my sense is that 2GB Ram is on the low end for a packed Windows 7 system - I'm running mine on Linux which tends to be nicer to your RAM.

dstillman

If this persists after disabling other extensions:

1) Check CPU usage.

2) Provide Debug IDs for different operations.

As adamsmith notes, toggling the Zotero pane open and closed in an open window—after the first time you open it in a Firefox session—should be instantaneous.