Hello, I've tried upgrading to the latest official version of Zotero 7, and I noticed that after opening the software, it occupies 2GB of memory, whereas Zotero 6, which I was using before, only needed about 400MB. This is really baffling.
(Please stop posting to the announcement thread — I specifically asked there to start new threads for any problems, and you were reminded of that in response to your initial comment as well.)
To perform a clean installation, I uninstalled Zotero 6 and installed the official release of Zotero 7. However, I encountered an issue: when I opened 20 PDF files using Zotero 7 (the same number of documents I had previously opened with Zotero 6), Zotero 7 used 2GB of memory, whereas Zotero 6 only used 400MB. This causes my memory to quickly fill up when using other software. With Zotero 6, the number of opened PDF files did not significantly impact memory usage, but with Zotero 7, the memory usage is greatly affected by the number of opened PDFs.
I apologize if my previous message seemed a bit forward. I want to express my deep appreciation for your work—Zotero is hands down the best software for managing literature, and it's become my go-to tool. It's integrated so seamlessly into my daily life that it's evolved from a literature management tool into an all-encompassing organizer.
That’s why I sincerely hope your development team can optimize this aspect, if this issue does indeed exist. I would be incredibly grateful for your attention to this matter.
Assuming this is Windows, Zotero 6 was a 32-bit app on Windows, so it was very conservative about the number of tabs it left loaded. If you're now using the 64-bit version and have a system with more than 8 GB of RAM, Zotero will keep a couple more tabs loaded — currently up to 5. It would be normal for it to use 2 GB if you have some decent-sized PDFs with images, etc.
We're going to be making some changes to have Zotero automatically respond to low-memory conditions and be more aggressive about unloading inactive tabs, and we're of course always trying to lower memory usage. But unless you're actually low on memory, it doesn't matter too much how much memory an app is using — keeping Zotero tabs loaded just means there's less of a delay as you switch between them.
(Zotero 6 wouldn't have been using only 400 MB with 3 PDFs open, though, unless they were extremely basic files. I suspect you're misremembering that.)
Upgrade Storage
We're going to be making some changes to have Zotero automatically respond to low-memory conditions and be more aggressive about unloading inactive tabs, and we're of course always trying to lower memory usage. But unless you're actually low on memory, it doesn't matter too much how much memory an app is using — keeping Zotero tabs loaded just means there's less of a delay as you switch between them.
(Zotero 6 wouldn't have been using only 400 MB with 3 PDFs open, though, unless they were extremely basic files. I suspect you're misremembering that.)