Speed limitations Zotero 1.5-sync3.4

oxburgh · December 2, 2008

I have imported a 2,500 ref Endnote library. Accessing it takes around 20 secs each time, and Firefox is locked up and greyed out for the duration of the wait. Is there a way to speed this up? I am running a desktop with dual 1.8GHz processors/4MB RAM/Ubuntu 8.04. Increasing Firefox cache size to 500MB or clearing it has no effect, nor does rebuilding the index and the database integity is OK. I have no other problems with Firefox, so I don't think it is that.

Any help or suggestions appreciated - it is important for me to show that Zotero will work responsively with my library (which is a modest size for my kind of research), so that I can switch my workplace to open source.

dstillman · December 3, 2008

Performance should be much improved for some operations from Zotero 1.0, but other areas still need to be optimized and should improve by Zotero 1.5 Final.

I assume the 20 seconds you're referring to are when you first open Zotero after starting Firefox? Zotero caches various things at that point to speed up later access, so, for the time being, you might consider leaving at least one Firefox window open. (This is more an issue on Windows and Linux than on OS X, where closing all the windows of an app doesn't quit it completely.)

oxburgh · December 6, 2008

Thanks for the advice. If it is a lag due to caching shouldn't I expect to see faster access times on the 2'nd, 3'rd access if I don't close the browser window? When I leave the Firefox window open and switch from my library to a Collection, and back to the library it is the same 20 second lag and hung Firefox as when I first open Firefox and access the Zotero library. Is there a a setting to increase the RAM available to Zotero? I have tried the same library on a brand new iMac with 4GB RAM, and it behaves almost identically (access time might be 15 seconds instead of 20).

One other thing I was wondering is whether my library might be the culprit. It has been growing in Endnote since 1996. Although the content has been actively curated, I assume there is scope for some kind of corruption in 12 years. Does anyone have experience with this?