Zotero lagging

JBlem

Zotero has been running very slow for a couple of weeks. After the most basic actions (scrolling in a stored pdf, highlighting, copying, selecting text, etc., but also selecting entries in my library etc.) the coloured wheel cursor appears and Zotero lags for a couple of seconds. While this is not a huge problem, it is very annoying.

I already checked a couple of posts on this and removed a plugin I didn't need but the problem persists and I can't find my specific issue on the forum posts that I checked (e.g. my problem is not about Zotero lagging in a word-doc, but in Zotero itself).

I am using Zotero 6.0.37 on a MacBook M1 Pro running macOS Sonoma 14.4.1 (23E224), so perhaps I should upgrade to the 7 beta? If anyone has some info that would be greatly appreciated!

dstillman

You can certainly install the Zotero 7 beta, but that's not normal for Zotero 6. You should 1) restart your computer and 2) hold down Option when starting Zotero to start it in Safe Mode with all plugins disabled and see if you can still reproduce the problem.

JBlem

ok will do! thank you fro the ever-quick response

JBlem

the problem was gone after I restarted my laptop! I often leave Zotero and my laptop open for very long times, perhaps that might explain the lagging?

JBlem

update: Zotero starts lagging again after it has been open for a while (although not as badly as previously). Perhaps large open word-documents make it slower after a while? The problem was fixed again when I restarted Zotero (without rebooting my laptop now)

dstillman

Any debugging would have to happen in Zotero 7 at this point.

E.g., you could see if Zotero's memory usage (as shown in Activity Monitor) grows to many gigabytes and never goes back down after you close tabs, etc. But in Zotero 6, the best we can advise is to check whether it seems to be caused by a plugin.

The Mac Word plugin is relatively slow — we're working with Microsoft to speed it up — but that shouldn't affect other usage of Zotero.