Spinning Beach Ball of Death

98Muyw7

Please let me apologize in advance. I'm hesitant to post this because I was unable to gather any info due to the way the failure occurred, so everything is observational. I'm only posting it as a cautionary, one-off observation, but if I weren't obsessive about backups, it would be a different story.
My computer is an M2 Mac Air running Sequoia 15.5. I was running the Zotero version previous to 7.0.18, but I had to kill it so don't have the version.. I think it was .17.
I have a very large library of ~24,000 items in 84GB of Storage. Zotero has performed flawlessly until today.
It worked perfectly yesterday. The only thing that I changed was I bumped the number of pages per item to be indexed to 1,000 from 100 because I continued to have a lot of partials... ~ 11,000. I periodically check database integrity and had done one this morning. No issues were found.
I also have a lot of saved searches, many of them nested. This morning I clicked on one those nested searches and got the SBBoD. Menus were inaccessible so I couldn't turn on troubleshooting. Finally I did a Force Quit and restarted Zotero. Same result. Did a Force Quit and restarted the Mac. It came up in the same saved search with SBBoD. During one of the restarts when I could click on a menu, the Settings menu came up but the central pane was greyed out. I could click each of the menu items but nothing happened. I performed multiple tweaked iterations of this all with the same result.
I renamed one of the .bak files and restarted. Same result.
I finally trashed the Zotero instance and downloaded .18 and started from one of my full folder backups. Everything seems normal at this time.
When I worked at a tracking station, we actually had a maintenance tag to hang on broken equipment that was labeled SDWDKW. (S&*t Don't Work, Don't Know Why). That would seem to apply in this case.
I tried everything in my software testing kit but failed miserably. If I hadn't been so gobsmacked by the failure I'dve gotten some screenshots.

adamsmith

I don't think there's much to troubleshoot given the lack of debug, error messages, etc., but just to be clear since this is a bit confusing in your post -- Zotero instance and Zotero data directory are entirely separate, so you could have uninstalled Zotero and reinstalled it (or just installed 7.0.18 manually) without using any backups.

For future reference, here's the guidance on reporting startup errors, which you'd want to use if you'd like to get more helpful debug output for devs (or yourself): https://www.zotero.org/support/reporting_problems#reporting_startup_errors

98Muyw7

Thanks @adamsmith I appreciate your response to my more emotional than useful post. My "... tried everything in my software testing kit..." contains numerous attempts at restarts, using computer restarts, app restarts, using .bak sqlite files from the data directory, etc. I have two other profiles with separate data directories which worked normally, so the Zotero instance wasn't suspect. However, I did download and install a fresh instance, but the failure with my primary data directory continued. The " reporting startup errors" doc will be very useful in the unlikely event anything like this happens in the future. My entire effort was focussed on getting to the output logging function but that wasn't happening. I'm sure the -Zoterodebug CLI restart would have saved my bacon, if I'd just been smart enough to go find the document.

As an aside, since I wasn't clear in the post, the first freeze happened instantly when I clicked on a pretty complex nested saved search, but one which had worked fine in the past and had not been modified, and after I bumped the "Maximum pages to index per file:" parameter from 100 to 1,000. There were no other system or data changes between the last successful start and the one that failed. All restarts, by design I assume, went to the saved state where that saved search was still selected. Attempts to select My Library or a static collection instead of that saved search were unsuccessful. I should also have mentioned that Better BibTex was disabled at the time, so no fault there. Zotero has been absolutely rock solid for me over the years, so when something happened, my response was less than adequate. With the "reporting startup errors" document printed and stapled to my forehead, that won't happen again.

dstillman

All restarts, by design I assume, went to the saved state where that saved search was still selected.

By design, yes, but we should actually add a check to make sure the selected view loads successfully at startup and revert to My Library if it doesn't.