Upgrade Storage[Feature request] Reduce Zotero RAM usage
On MacOS (but I suspect this is web-view-based and most likely plagues other OSs as well, as confirmed in some of the below links) RAM usage is very high, with about 1GB of RAM usage when idling - i.e. with no PDF opened. The issue of course becomes more pregnant as PDFs are opened.
This has been reported here and there (whether for idling or when opening PDFs):
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/128050/high-memeroy-use/p1
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/127748/pdf-consumes-too-much-memory-resources
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/127229/poor-performance-with-7-0-24-64-bit
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/126516/high-memory-requirements
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/121215/high-memory-usage-and-performance-issues-in-zotero-7-when-handling-pdfs
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/124789/ram-usage-on-mac-os
(I only took a handful of links but the issue has been reported many MANY times on these forums)
While it *can* be linked to plug-ins, it would seem to mostly not be the case, with Zotero devs making answers like "1-4GB of RAM use is normal". Still, it would appear from the above links that a large number of users (including me) are quite concerned by Zotero's RAM usage. This is becoming increasingly problematic since the current RAM prices are skyrocketing, and most computers will thus be bound to use 8-16GB of RAM in the upcoming years (both SK Hynix and Samsung envision RAM shortage up to 2028).
As a result, it would seem quite a priority to focus on reducing Zotero RAM usage in forthcoming developments.
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For reference, I did some testing with Google Chrome and PDF-viewer tabs for a bunch of research papers I had at hand. Each PDF tab eats up about 150-300MB of RAM depending on the PDF length, while the Browser alone eats about 200MB. It would be nice to have similar figures for Zotero.
While I acknowledge that there is some JavaScript overhead at play here, and that Zotero is mostly not coded in Rust / C++, other complex app manage to have low memory footprint (Reaper or Zed typically eat about 200-300MB). On the other hand, I reckon that GAFAM-garbage apps can have similar footprints (think of Outlook, Office365, or a Gmail tab, which can all eat up about 1GB). So I guess this is no easy task, but I think that it would be greatly appreciated by the whole user-base.
Also, as a side note, while one app eating 1GB of RAM is not a problem *per se*, the issue comes from the fact that one can easily have as a standard workflow something like [Outlook + IDE + Zotero + Onedrive or the like + Office / TeXStudio + WebBrowser] (minimally). And if each of these app eats up 1-3GB of RAM (and likely twice as much in practice), one quickly ends up short-RAM with a bloated / unresponsive system even with 16GB of RAM installed.
This has been reported here and there (whether for idling or when opening PDFs):
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/128050/high-memeroy-use/p1
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/127748/pdf-consumes-too-much-memory-resources
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/127229/poor-performance-with-7-0-24-64-bit
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/126516/high-memory-requirements
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/121215/high-memory-usage-and-performance-issues-in-zotero-7-when-handling-pdfs
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/124789/ram-usage-on-mac-os
(I only took a handful of links but the issue has been reported many MANY times on these forums)
While it *can* be linked to plug-ins, it would seem to mostly not be the case, with Zotero devs making answers like "1-4GB of RAM use is normal". Still, it would appear from the above links that a large number of users (including me) are quite concerned by Zotero's RAM usage. This is becoming increasingly problematic since the current RAM prices are skyrocketing, and most computers will thus be bound to use 8-16GB of RAM in the upcoming years (both SK Hynix and Samsung envision RAM shortage up to 2028).
As a result, it would seem quite a priority to focus on reducing Zotero RAM usage in forthcoming developments.
---
For reference, I did some testing with Google Chrome and PDF-viewer tabs for a bunch of research papers I had at hand. Each PDF tab eats up about 150-300MB of RAM depending on the PDF length, while the Browser alone eats about 200MB. It would be nice to have similar figures for Zotero.
While I acknowledge that there is some JavaScript overhead at play here, and that Zotero is mostly not coded in Rust / C++, other complex app manage to have low memory footprint (Reaper or Zed typically eat about 200-300MB). On the other hand, I reckon that GAFAM-garbage apps can have similar footprints (think of Outlook, Office365, or a Gmail tab, which can all eat up about 1GB). So I guess this is no easy task, but I think that it would be greatly appreciated by the whole user-base.
Also, as a side note, while one app eating 1GB of RAM is not a problem *per se*, the issue comes from the fact that one can easily have as a standard workflow something like [Outlook + IDE + Zotero + Onedrive or the like + Office / TeXStudio + WebBrowser] (minimally). And if each of these app eats up 1-3GB of RAM (and likely twice as much in practice), one quickly ends up short-RAM with a bloated / unresponsive system even with 16GB of RAM installed.