Zotero freezing when loading

whuber

Hello,

I've been dealing with freezing on Zotero for a while now, on a laptop which has been rebuilt. (The freezing problem occured before the rebuild.)

The browser freezes and is unusable for as long as half an hour. This occurs whether or not I am synching attachments only as needed or in entirety, with the plug-in or with standalone. I have removed zotero and deleted the profile without effect. Even overnight synching doesn't work: the next time I open the Zotero pane, the freezing recurs.

Visually, it seems as if it freezes while loading item-type icons.

I am not able to access the preference pane to start logging before the freeze. Any help would be appreciated.

aurimas

See if you can generate real time debug log and email it to support@zotero.org with a link to this thread. https://www.zotero.org/support/debug_output#real-time_debug_output

aurimas

But before you do that, I'm actually not clear when (after what action) the freeze happens. Is this after opening the Zotero pane on Firefox? After loading some page?

whuber

Many thanks. I've sent ahead the debug log.

It freezes immediately after opening the Zotero pane. Also happens in Standalone. Often, after a *long* time, it will unfreeze. But even after letting it set for a while, if I close Firefox, it will freeze again.

aurimas

Dan, could you please take a look at the log?

dstillman

I am not able to access the preference pane to start logging before the freeze. Any help would be appreciated.

You can do this in Zotero for Firefox via the Add-ons window, or, better yet, use the "Enable after restart" option. There's not actually anything to go on in the output you sent.

But first, try closing the tag selector in the bottom left, particularly if this is a touchscreen PC. There's a known issue with touchscreen PCs that causes extreme slowdowns in large libraries with the tag selector open.

whuber

I have an error report: 1237979142.

But yes, this laptop has a touchscreen. I'll also try closing the tag selector on this laptop. Is that setting synched between instances? I could get by keep the tag selector closed on this system and using it on my non-touchscreen systems. Might there also be a way to disable it in settings, so that I don't accidentally reopen it with an errant click?

whuber

Oh, and I also have a Debug ID of D704246883.

whuber

And yes, the tag selection/touchscreen issue seems to be at hand here. I don't use tags extensively, so hopefully minimizing it will be a workaround for now. Is it known whether this a Zotero problem, a Firefox problem, a javascript problem, or a Windows 8.1 problem?

adamsmith

No, as far as I know the exact source isn't known, it's an interaction between Windows's touchscreen engine and something in Zotero/Firefox, but I don't think it's been narrowed down beyond that. Dan says it's unlikely that it would be a Zotero issue, which in a way is worse, because it will likely take longer to get it fixed in mozilla let alone Windows.

iOMEDICO_HH

Any known workaround? Zotero war working fine on my Lenovo Yoga Thinkpad (Touchscreen, Windows 8.1). However, about a year ago I had to use the stand alone version which was working fine till 2 month ago. Now I am thinking "moving" zotero into a virtual machine - I almost can't believe that :-( It is such a great piece of software :-)

aurimas

Hiding the tags pane should reduce the freezing.

iOMEDICO_HH

Thank you soooo much - it never froze since I hid the tag plane :-) However, I wonder if such a "trivial" issue cannot be fixed, as more and more people will be using touch screens...

sophisattic

Hi guys, I'm hoping to buy a touchscreen device (Acer Aspire Switch 10V) for my commute to uni, but was wary because of this issue. Does anyone know whether it's still ongoing?
Thanks,
Sophie

adamsmith

I can't promise, but this hasn't come up for a long time, so I'm pretty sure it's fixed (it'd have been a fix upstream at mozilla/Firefox).

sophisattic

Great, that sounds promising :)