word plugin doesn't work and makes firefox crash

margueriteronin

bonjour, hello

I have been using zotero for a while now and have used it for my entire PhD dissertation. I didn't encounter any problem then.
now that it's all over (but I still have to work on it), I do encounter a problem : the word plugin works with difficulties, when it works at all and makes firefox crash most of the time.

while writting, each chapter was in its own word document (about 50 pages and very few images). Then I had no problems with the plugin, nor in the footnotes, neither for inserting the bibliography.
when I united all the 8 docs together appeared the problem : when I try to insert a citation or edit an existing one, computer gets very slow and firefox crashes most of the time. impossible to edit the yet inserted bibliography. final doc is 600 pages and weighs 8000 ko

ma question : does it come from the compatibility between zotero/ firefox/ word versions ?
OR
might it come from the fact that my computer is kind of old ? (bought 6 years ago) although it runs perfectly and never gets into any of that kind of trouble, nor gets specially slow.(samsung Q310)

ma bibliothèque contient 1500 items
word 2007
zotero 4.0.24.1
plugin 3.1.17
firefox 33.1

j'ai désinstallé et réinstallé zotero et le plugin mais sans succès

thanks for letting me know your suggestions

adamsmith

what do you mean by crash? Does it actually shut down or does it just say non-responding? You would see significant slowdowns working on a large document with many citations.

margueriteronin

thanks for your answer

it does actually shut down (after having considerably slowed down)
it is a large document (600 pages) with at least 4 footnotes by page.
(i actually worry about the need to change my computer which runs perfectly all right except for that)

aurimas

With 600 pages and over 2000 footnotes, I can't say that this is completely unexpected. If you experience similar issues with shorter documents (say 50 pages), there might be something we can do, but otherwise, performance improvements in Word are not going to happen in the very near future.

I suppose Firefox shouldn't be crashing either way and we'll try to reproduce this. If you're wiling to share your thesis (with Zotero developers, not publicly), you can email it to support@zotero.org with a link to this thread, but not having access to your Zotero library may prevent us from reproducing the issue.

adamsmith

I assume this is an out of memory issue, since Zotero loads all citations from the document into memory when processing them. If I'm right about this, computer with more RAM would indeed fix this.

aurimas

You might be right, but we would be doing something wrong (it's possible that we are) if 2000 citations can use that much RAM.

aurimas

Also, if Firefox does crash, you should be asked to submit a crash report, which you should do. You can then provide a link to the crash report here and we can see what caused the crash exactly. Follow the steps here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-crashes-troubleshoot-prevent-and-get-help#w_get-help-fixing-this-crash

margueriteronin

thanks for your concern

I definitely do not encounter similar issues with shorter documents (that's why I thought I'd just split my document and work on each chapter separately)

@aurimas
I could very well share my thesis (I'll send the e-mail tomorrow), and I can't see why you couldn't have access to my library. How can i grant you the access ?
and I will send you a firefox crashing report as well.

thanks a million for your help

M.

margueriteronin

hello,

@ aurimas

I tried to get a crash report from mozilla as you indicated
I followed the steps and accessed to a list of last crashes. But when clicking on any of the links provided, I'm redirected toward a "page not found". I didn't try to contact the mozilla support, though.

I just e-mailed my thesis to support@zotero.org. Do you need anything else ?

m.