Zotero Hangs for 1-2 Minutes

Genom

Hi,

I had problems with my Zotero for a while, since the free storage is only 300MB and my references are both on my personal PC and work PC. As you can guess, whenever I add a reference to my library from my work PC, files are stored locally and sync cannot upload them due to the limited storage. Therefore, I have recently moved my Zotero library ("zotero" directory in profile directory) on a samba network location to access it from both Zotero installations (personal and work).

(Maybe irrelevant: I also imported entries from my personal computer, after which I had duplicates for every reference. Then I removed the ones, which did not have the attached files. These are the ones synced without files due to the storage limitations.)

Right now, Zotero on my work PC is accessing this network location alone (I still did not connect my persona Zotero installation to this).

The main issue is that Zotero hangs once in a while for a couple of minutes, which is extremely annoying. The network location is on university servers, connected with a very fast connection and I never had any performance issue. I examined what Zotero is doing during this with Process Explorer in Windows 7 and apparently Zotero is reading directories (with attachment files) one after the another:
e.g.
...\zotero\storage\FDXAPB6Q
...\zotero\storage\12OPKR7E
...\zotero\storage\F4XZUB3U

Only think I was doing as user, was simply click around in Zotero (switching between collections and clicking in one or two references) or open a single PDF file. There is no reason why Zotero is accessing many of these directories, which seems to be the cause of freezing. I think there is a performance issue and Zotero could have worked more efficiently with file access. Interestingly, I do not observe the hanging if the directory is accessed locally. But also I do not see that Zotero accesses above-mentioned directories in Process Explorer.

I can provide more and detailed explanation of the observation. Please don't hesitate to ask, if you have any questions.

Thanks in advance!

adamsmith

moving the zotero data directory to a network drive is strongly advised against and not supported. As long as you do that, we unfortunately can't help you. There are various ways to sync files safely between computers without using Zotero storage that don't involve doing this (the most plausible would be a webDAV server), so I'd recommend doing that.

My best guess on why Zotero is checking directories would be to display the attachment status (the blue dot in the attachment column). That usually wouldn't take any significant amount of time, but apparently does given your set-up.

Genom

I understand. As a suggestion, Zotero might do that asynchronously or lazy (in case user actually clicks on the PDF file). This can also reduce number of disk IO operations and would be one step further to be network-share friendly. Anyhow, attachment information is kept in the SQLite DB.

adamsmith

5.0 is going to switch many processes to asynchronous, so that might happen. The main problem with putting the Zotero data folder on a network drive, though, is that SQlite DBs are not happy when synced via network drives (or dpropbox, for that matter), so in addition to any performance issues you're seeing, you're risking database corruption, and that's not going to change.

Genom

Great news! Although I do not know internals of SQLite DBs, it is simply accessible like any folder (maybe a bit slower). Anyway, I don't (can't) use those with 2 separate installations simultaneously. If this is not going to change anything, then I need to consider this risk more seriously.