Speed, stbility & clunkiness of Zotero?

richard p

I use Zotero standalone (= "Zot" below) but I suspect this Q has bearing on both standalone & web.

I have not bothered shifting all my pdf refs into subcategories/subfolders - as a result I have some 4000 refs sitting in a single folder. At times, opening Zot can be slow (my laptop uses i7-3635QM 2,4Ghz processor with 8 GB RAM). When I query, sort or transfer items, it can grinf to a halt (Zotero not responding) altho mainly it is just Zot thinking, & it eventually gets there ;-)

What number of files etc optimises Zot's performance??

Thanks

adamsmith

Opening Zotero for the first time can take some time, the idea is that you don't constantly open and close Zotero, but just leave it running in the background where it hardly consumes any resources.
If by "transfer" you mean dragging PDFs into Zotero, that mainly depends on the number of PDFs you're importing, not the size of your library.
Searching depends on the sort settings: If you do a full text (search everywhere) search on a library with thousands of items, that'll take a little.
More regular searches, e.g. for creator, title, year, should be pretty immediate with normal size libraries. Same for sorting: The ~5k items in my library sort in significantly under 1sec, and instantaneously when attachments and notes are collapsed.

Library sizes of 20-30k total items are not unusual and shouldn't lead to any significant performance issues on a computer like yours
https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/item_count

richard p

You are certainly working overtime tonight (& I note, not just with my Qs). Much appreciated Best R