Syncing is taking many hours; generating thousands of conflicts

ptrivedi1

We had a lot of trouble with syncing a group library, and 4201 conflicts were generated! I could not process each individual conflict, so our team members decided to return to working from our individual, local libraries.

I am attempting to sync again after deleting all that I could from the shared library. Approximately 8,000 entries were moved to the trash in the group library. Currently, the sync green arrow has been cycling for at least 3 hours. How long should a sync take? How do I know if it is hung up? There is an indication that the last sync occurred 3 days ago even though a dialog box comes up pretty consistently indicating it is syncing.

I've found zotero really frustrating to use so far, and am hoping it gets easier. I am an experienced researcher and have used extensively used other web-based software for the purpose of sharing libraries and eliminating duplicates.

thanks for any advice!

dstillman

You have a very large upload (25MB) stalled on the server. I can reset it and have it try again, but that's a very large amount of data, and it may be difficult to get it to go through at once.

Approximately 8,000 entries were moved to the trash in the group library.

Did you empty the trash? If not, that's likely the problem.

Let me know once you've cleared the trash and I can reset the upload.

ptrivedi1

Thanks Dan,

After several tries with Firefox crashing, I was finally able to empty the trash on a Group Library.

It would be helpful to know for the future an estimate of the maximum number of allowable records for a Group Library. Please let me know when I should try to sync again.

dstillman

After several tries with Firefox crashing, I was finally able to empty the trash on a Group Library.

Do you mean "crashing" or "freezing"? If the latter (or even the former, if it was crashing due to memory usage) you can always select a subset of items in the trash and press the Delete key to delete them permanently in batches.

It would be helpful to know for the future an estimate of the maximum number of allowable records for a Group Library.

There's no max—people have tens of thousands of items in their libraries—but right now Zotero syncs all changes at once, so if you've imported/modified/copied/trashed many thousands of items between syncs, you can run into trouble. We're switching to a new syncing architecture in Zotero 4.1 that will sync items in smaller batches to avoid problems like these.

Please let me know when I should try to sync again.

Try now.

ptrivedi1

Hi Dan, thanks again for the information. I tried to sync again and got this error:

Component returned failure code: 0x8007000e (NS_ERROR_OUT_OF_MEMORY) [nsIScriptableUnicodeConverter.convertToInputStream]

Please advise when you have the chance.

dstillman

How much RAM do you have in your system? You might have more luck if you close everything else and restart your computer, and then try again before starting anything else.

ptrivedi1

The computer has 2.98 MB of RAM. It is unlikely that it will be upgraded. I will try to make sure everything else is closed and try the sync again.

thanks

ptrivedi1

Sorry Dan, I meant 2.98 GB of RAM. I tried the syncing a couple of times this morning with nothing else open on the computer but Firefox and here is the message I got more than 1x:

Invalid response from server.Please try again in a few minutes.

Any other suggestions for how I can get this syncing done would be greatly appreciated.

thanks

ptrivedi1

I'm beginning to think there is no hope of getting my data synced so I can work on this from home! Here is the latest error message after trying to sync (and not having anything open for 1.5 hours:

Error processing uploaded data (Report ID: 79649f83)

Any advice?

dstillman

Those were actually just temporary glitches with the Zotero servers earlier today. How about now?

ptrivedi1

Dear Dan,

I started the sync yesterday at 12 noon, it is 22 hours later and the green arrow is still cycling indicating it is 'getting updated data from the sync server' This time I haven't received any error messages, and though I wasn't in front of the computer last night, I left it running. Please advise.

thanks.

dstillman

You're still trying to upload a very large number of trashed items. Empty your trash in your personal library, and any other group libraries you control, and then post here when you do so I can clear your stalled sync.

ptrivedi1

Thanks for your response. There were 756 items in my personal trash that I just emptied. I don't control any group libraries, but we already entered the trash in a library I was a member of. I downloaded 3404 articles from a research database (ERIC) that I am sorting. It would be helpful to have acess to this from home and work, so I would appreciate anything you can do to help with syncing. It seems like we have been going back and forth for almost 10 days now.

thanks very much.

dstillman

Try again now, and post here when you do.