Zotero painfully slow, crashing

marionsd

I switched from Zotero with Firefox to standalone with Chrome because performance was so bad that I was spending 5-6 times as long editing a document as it should take me. It seemed to help, but now I'm finding it's just as bad. I've spent several hours now doing what should be at most 1-2 hours' work. I've valued Zotero enough to make a lot of people in our organization sign up and develop group libraries, but this is not a viable long-term situation. Any suggestions on how to make it better?

fbennett

How large is the document (by number of references), and what is the platform (Word/LibreOffice, Windows/Mac/Linux)?

marionsd

It's only a 24-pager with maybe 30-40 references? Nowhere near what I'd consider large. My libraries are large - not full of PDFs but about 5000 records - but I don't think it should be this bad. Platform is Windows/Word.

fbennett

It should be quite zippy with a document that size, and a 5,000-item library is well within the comfort zone. What operations are slow or unstable - and does the problem extend to Zotero proper, or is it limited to document editing?

marionsd

Zotero is never "zippy" for me, but when it's dreadful slow is when I'm running it with Word. It does seem to get worse the more coding goes into a document; I recently did a very large report in which instead of coding references, we were doing them as endnotes (so full bibliographic entry in each endnote, no Zotero codes at all), and that seemed to work much better. This is Word 2013, by the way, but my computer at work, with Word 2010, also struggles with Zotero.

fbennett

I'd better let the developers take over from here, but there are a few things you might try. The tag selector in the lower-left corner of the Zotero pane can affect performance. If it is open, try closing it. If there is no change, auto-sync might be a factor, so try turning that off. If you are getting crashes on top of the speed issues, you can check database integrity from Preferences -> Advanced -> Files and Folders.

Apart from that, I'll leave you in the hands of the developers. Dan or Aurimas may ask for a Debug ID that shows the symptoms, with auto-sync disabled.

marionsd

Thanks, that's very helpful! I'm a little afraid of disabling auto-sync, but I'll try it when things slow down. Definitely any help from the developers would be appreciated!

adamsmith

definitely try the tag selector and submit a debug ID that captures an action with excessive lag time.

aurimas

You shouldn't _need_ to disable anything with the library your size. It might help disabling some things to figure out where the slow downs are actually coming from.

As fbennett suggests above, you should produce a Debug ID for a _single_ operation that is slow (e.g. switching collections, or performing a search, or editing a title). If you can, also provide a Report ID, which will tell us more about your setup.