How Long to Copy To Group Library

dale_huffman
I've just created a new group, imported 7874 items into My Library. I'm trying to copy them over to the group library, by opening imported collection, Ctrl-A to select all, drag-drop onto group. Firefox has been locked (dark grey) for > 2hrs now.

How long should I wait?
Is something wrong?
Shouldn't this be fast, I'm on a fairly fast machine?
What trouble am I in for, if I force close Firefox while this copy is happening?

Is there any plan for a user feedback mechanism in Zotero, so the use has some clue about what is happening internally? There seem to be way too many things that lock firefox with no feedback (from my perspective with a large database)? I guess if FF is locked it probably won't work anyway.

On Linux, w/ FF 4.0, Zotero (latest version installed/updated a few days ago)
  • dstillman
    Most of Zotero was written before Mozilla provided mechanisms to avoid locking the UI during long operations. Now that they do, we have plans to rewrite some of the core components to allow UI updates, but that'll require significant work.

    We'd have to look into that particular operation to see why it's taking so long, but there's a decent chance it's still going. Copying items into a group library makes complete copies of those items. Check for CPU and disk activity.

    If you want to start again with smaller batches, force-quitting Firefox shouldn't really cause problems, but you might want to check the timestamp of the zotero.sqlite.bak file in your Zotero data directory to see when the last backup is, just in case something goes terribly awry and your database becomes corrupted (though again, that absolutely shouldn't happen).
  • dstillman
    And to be clear, no, certainly it's not acceptable for any operation in Zotero to take two hours, but we'd have to examine it to say more.
  • dale_huffman
    edited May 4, 2011
    FYI: If it helps anyone...

    It seems to be an exponential, at least squared order, operation.

    250 copies finished quickly < 30 sec.
    500 took a minute
    1000 took few minutes
    2000 took 10+ minutes
    3000 almost 1/2 hour, and still going possibly not finishing???

    It finished - exactly 1/2 hour

    Also - did it from My Library directly instead of from collection - if that matters.
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