Syncing again taking long time

netbuoy

I understood that syncing was going to get much better earlier this year when there were some architecture changes made, but I am still seeing very long sync times on pdf files. Is there an issue with load? Some other problem? Once upon a time the guidance was NOT to exit FF as one would lose one's place in the queue. Is this the best advice?

adamsmith

what is a long time? I haven't seen any complaints about syncing recently - could it just be that your upload speed is slow? And yes, generally don't quit FF.

netbuoy

I have 1.3MB download and .3 MB upload to Boston from my location even during the sync. I have about 15 megs of pdfs that I started syncing some 20 hours ago.

dstillman

You don't say what the actual problem is. What do you see on your screen?

Syncing data and syncing files are separate processes. During the latter, there's a progress bar that shows file transfer progress on hover.

netbuoy

All I have is the circular green arrow. I have not gotten the blue progress bar at all. It says last sync 22 hours ago.

dstillman

Then restart Firefox.

netbuoy

lol, OK, thanks.... Is this a FF thing, as it seems to happen a good deal?

dstillman

It shouldn't happen, and it's not a common problem people report anymore. If you can reproduce it reliably, provide a Report ID and a Debug ID for the first few minutes of a sync attempt.

netbuoy

FYI, after I restarted FF Z produced an exclamation point and indicated there was a version sync issue with a file (another person was editing it) and once I merged the doc the sync finish quickly and the file sync was almost immediate.

kentaroh.takagaki

I also have a seemingly related problem, where Firefox stops responding for 30s or so during syncing. This only seems to happen when I am actively adding PDFs to the collection. I have a large collection with many attached PDFs, and my connection at home is slow. This problem is less noticeable when I'm at work, with a fast connection.

If this is a recurrent problem, I'd like to request a sync lockout feature, so that sync does not happen when I am interacting with Firefox.

adamsmith

at the end of a sync Zotero may take over FF for some time - e.g. to index newly added pdfs.
If you're bothered by that you can just turn off automatic syncing and do it manually or you can use standalone.

malutz

I'm attempting to sync a large number (~1300) of citations, and the sync is also taking a long time. (I'm migrating them over from RefWorks.)

I'm using the standalone product. When I initially started trying to sync these citations, I got an error due to long tags. I went through the resulting dialog boxes and split (and sometimes eliminated some) tags. That seemed to resolve things, and I haven't seen any errors since. However, my sync has been running for days. I tried quitting and restarting on Sunday (I believe that was after 2-3 days of syncing). At that time, I restarted my computer and reopened the standalone product. I believe the green arrow was spinning when I opened it, and I've let it run since then (i.e., Sunday at around 4 pm). When I hover over the arrow it says "Getting updated data from sync server."

Any thoughts? What should I do next?

dstillman

maultz: How many items do you have in your local libraries? You have a massive upload queued on the server, and it's going to be difficult for that to finish. Have you emptied the trash in all your libraries?

(We're working on ways to improve syncing of extremely large libraries, but that's still a little ways off.)

malutz

Good idea. I see what you mean; I had a very large number (9,925; 34,205 with children) of items in my local libraries...many were redundant/not necessary. I've deleted all these unnecessary items and I now have 859 items (2,242 with children) in my local libraries.

I also emptied a good number of items from the trash in both my local library and one of my group libraries.

Sorry about trying to throw all that at your servers. It sounds like that should help resolve it. How long would you expect the sync to take (i.e., when should I assume things aren't going well)?

dstillman

No, the servers should be able to handle it—it'll just take some more work to get there.

I've cleared your previous upload attempt from the sync queue, so if you try now it should go through pretty quickly.

malutz

The sync seems to be making progress (I can now see items in this group folder in my account on the zotero website). However, now I'm getting a consistent error indicating an 'Invalid session ID.'

I'm not sure if this is related to this last problem or not..seems like it might be independent.

After I click OK, it appears to go back to syncing. Then it throws up a dialog box indicating that I need to do conflict resolution on items between the local and remote objects. I've gone through 3 cycles of this, and the items to work through are less each time (first 29, then 25, now 24) but they appear to be the same items again and again. Any thoughts?

dstillman

You shouldn't get "Invalid session ID" unless you're leaving the conflict window up for a long time before addressing it (though we should fix that). Try restarting Zotero (or Firefox, if you're using Zotero for Firefox), clicking sync, and then clicking through the conflict resolution window as soon as it appears. If you still get an error, report it and provide the Report ID.

malutz

Yup, I had been just doing it in the background and intermittently paying attention to it. You're suggestion totally did the trick. I'm all synced up. Thanks so much!