Zotero collection size and growth capacity

sohail

Greetings.

I've been using Zotero for about three weeks now, and I seem to be adding data to my collection at about 100MB/week so far. Hard drive space isn't a problem, but I'm wondering if, at some point, all this data will slow Zotero/Firefox down to the point where it's no longer usable. At this rate, I'll have about 5GB by the end of the year in my collection.

Thoughts? Comments?


Cheers,
Sohail Mamdani

ahoward

I'm not sure that there's any particular amount of data that will slow your system down significantly, especially since that's probably dependent on your hardware. Further, it's not the file size that matters to Zotero's performance, only the number of items. I'd imagine most of the 100MB/week is large PDFs, correct? So unless you're adding a very large number of separate files, you should be fine.

If you are doing that, though, there are solutions that people use to make large amounts of data more manageable, which would prevent both you and Zotero from getting bogged down.

The first is to use multiple libraries. You can simply change the location where Zotero looks for your library. This is done through the Advanced tab in Preferences. You would then need to restart Firefox. This won't copy over your existing library, but I don't imagine you want to duplicate your library. If you did want that, you'd have to copy the original data directory into the new data directory yourself. Anyway, once you restart Firefox, you should have a blank slate to work with. When you wanted to access different libraries, you would simply change the path where Zotero looks for the data directory and restart Firefox.

The better solution, to my mind, is to use multiple Firefox profiles. This page demonstrates how to create and manage multiple profiles. Each would automatically have a separate Zotero library (in fact, you'd have to install Zotero again on each profile). You can even have multiple instances of Firefox running simultaneously, each with a different profile, so you could access multiple libraries at once. You have to run Firefox from the command line to achieve this. It's just the same as in the link I posted, only you'd run it without the profile manager command flag.

I hope that helps somewhat.

sohail

thanks, ahoward...

So the majority of the data is actually web snapshots (lots of them, about 30-60 a weekday), lots of PDFs (not large ones - no more than 1 or 2MB, usually), some video files. That's really what concerns me - I don't want my collection to become a resources hog.

Hardware-wise, I'm running on the newest MacBook Pro with 4GB RAM, so I think I'm ok there. I just don't know if Zotero has an inherent inability to handle data sets that can range into thousands of articles (mostly web snapshots)...

The difficulty in using multiple profiles or libraries is that I'd have to switch to those profiles or libraries to search the archives, and I'd much rather not have to...



Cheers,
Sohail

Tjowens

The key issue for speed is your number of items. I know of many users with thousands of records, and a few with tens of thousands. My primary library has 2139 items right now and runs great in Zotero 1.5. 1.5 runs noticeably quicker.

mark

My library contains just under 2000 items, with the attachments amounting to 4Gb (mainly PDFs, some of them very large). So far I have not experienced speed problems in 1.5 Sync Preview (Firefox 3.0.5). However, deleting an item from the library does take noticably longer in a large library.