Self-organizing Zotero?

darrask

For one year, I have been daily importing hundreds of references into Zotero.

One day, I decided to purge my library by removing collections because Zotero had gotten so slow (6 min for startup, 1 min for removing collection).

I got from ca. 120 000 items to less than 10 000 items, I have a hundred items with attached PDFs, which should not be much.

Zotero is still as slow as before. I currently have 460 folders in Zotero's "storage"folder weighing 460 MB.

I wonder: isn't Zotero's structure self-organizing, so that big library changes like this one make an improvement or at least alleviate its performance issues? Would be sad that Zotero gets like Windows where only a fresh install can fix latent problems.

PS: After my library purge, I started having import error messages, which probably led to the issue I reported here: http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/15146/consistently-wrong-import/#Item_1

noksagt

I currently have 460 folders in Zotero's "storage"folder weighing 460 MB.

Each folder is for a separate attachment; items with multiple attachments (perhaps both HTML and PDF snapshots for some items, leading to two folders for an item). This would suggest you have at least twice as many items with attachments as the "hundred" that you mention. Have you emptied the trash? This is not so big anyway: my day-to-day library has twice the items and takes up twice the space. And having attachments in your storage directory doesn't really slow things down.

Having a large database (sqlite file) MIGHT. And one effective technique at shrinking database size is to shrink the size of the fulltext index. Had you done this?

I started having import error messages,

You haven't said what import error messages you have.

darrask

I purged my library (deleted everything), finally.
It turned out that I used "remove collection" to delete my references. I did not know that it does not delete the references! Although the different terms suggest it, I would provide for an option to delete references folder-wise other than just "remove collection", because people using a folder structure can easily forget the library root, where all these items accumulate when they think they removed them.

What's more, I had a great deal of these items duplicated. When you import an identical reference twice, shouldn't duplicate references be forbidden? Does it take space for nothing? If it doesn't, it does at least take space in the Zotero pane for nothing.

Now Zotero is fast. I will try to reduce the fulltext index when it'll get big eventually.

I can't reproduce the import message error yet, still working on the problem (http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/15160/rdf-import-fails-in-21b2-but-works-in-stable-209/#Item_1) for another error message.