standalone freezes, broken; Firefox OK

robinwilson

Hi Dan

thanks for your (typically rapid) response to previous query about syncing. I will certainly enable autosync from now on. However Zotero Firefox and standalone are pointing to the same data folder (I can only check that because I had previously bookmarked it). However I cannot change autosync or anything else with Zotero standalone because it crashes immediately I attempt to run it ("XUL runner not working"), before i can do anything! (I have Symnantec Endpoint protection running and thought that may have caused the problem so turned that off; it made no difference). Perhaps I should uninstall and reinstall Zotero standalone?

robinwilson

PS to the above: I think that I _did_ manage to enable autosync yesterday in Zotero standalone just before it started crashing. I can't remember now, but it may be that I had previously turned off autosync to prevent "XUL runner not working" crashes?

dstillman

You can go to your Standalone profile directory and delete prefs.js to reset the sync prefs, which will stop the auto-syncing.

If Zotero for Firefox syncs successfully and repeatedly, it would be very strange for Standalone to behave differently if it was configured with the same data directory and account, since it would be the same code running in both off of the same database.

robinwilson

Unfortunately I'm not out of the woods yet. I can access my zotero library using Zotero firefox. I can access my zotero library using Zotero standalone but only if autosync is turned off. If i turn autosync on Zotero standalone immediately crashes with the familiar "XUL runner not working" message. If i force a manual sync with zotero standalone i get the same crash. If I force a manual sync from Zotero Firefox I get a different error message "out of memory"; the full report has been automatically emailed to you with the Report ID: 1980650603 (apologies that i actually did this twice but lost the ID# from my clipboard the first time).

Bottom line: I can use Zotero locally quite happily but cannot sync to server.

adamsmith

out of memory unfortunately means just that: it's your computer running out of memory. Very large syncs can, indeed, use up very large amounts of memory.

From your description I'm a little surprised that would be the case here (are you expecting a big sync up or down?) but with the current sync architecture there isn't much you can do other than making sure to free up maximum resources on your computer (i.e. close down everything else including background processes you don't need).

dstillman

OK, that makes more sense, at least. How many items do you have in Zotero, including child items? Also make sure all the trashes in your libraries are empty.

dstillman

Ah, you said 39,000 in the other thread — but does that include child items?

dstillman

adamsmith: This was a Restore to Zotero Server, so it's a full upload of the whole library, with nothing on the server. (robinwilson, we strongly discourage use of the reset options for this reason.)

robinwilson

Hi Dan, Adam, yes, 39,000 items in the library. No attachments. No child items (not that I have knowingly created anyway). I will take home my Zotero data folder tonight on USB and try and do a manual sync from my home computer (Linux Mint) which should avoid RAM limitations. Thanks for the help.

robinwilson

PS to above, I do have many notes that I didn't realise I had, therefore including child items there are ~59,000 !