Very slow reference insertion

dannilamb
Hi,

I'm having problems with inserting references in a Word document, with it taking sometimes minutes to do anything. I've checked previous threads about this and have checked or done the things suggested (the tag selector is minimised, the document is small at 5 pages and <2500 words, I'm using author/date style, I have plenty of space on my hard drive, using Windows 7).

I tried getting an error log number while it was taking ages to insert a reference, but everything seems to freeze while this is happening, so not sure if this will be any use as it was obtained once I could click on things again: 166978264.

The problem seems to be partially rectified each time I restart my computer, but gradually gets worse and worse till Zotero is unusable.

Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks.
  • adamsmith
    Which Zotero versions and which Word processor? Certainly citations in a 5p document should be instantaneous.
  • dannilamb
    I'm using Zotero version 4.0.28.7 and Microsoft Word version 14.0.7128.5000 (32-bit). It's slightly better now than it was earlier on (since rebooting again), but certainly not instantaneous.
  • adamsmith
    Start by updating Zotero to 4.0.29.5 (or .7 if you're on Firefox). See if that helps.
  • dannilamb
    Sorry, should have said, I'm using Standalone and Chrome. I've updated to 4.0.29.5 but it doesn't seem to have made any difference. If I click the 'insert reference' button in the Word add-in and start typing the author name of the paper I want it's still freezing as soon as I type the first couple of letters, sometimes for a second, sometimes longer, and then eventually pulls up the list of references to pick from. This morning it was taking minutes to do this, now it's more like 2-15 seconds, so it is better than it was, though I can't think of anything I've done other than reboot to affect it.
  • adamsmith
    Could you try in an empty document for testing? Does it work instantaneously there?

    If so, I think a debug ID for inserting a citation from Standalone would help (different from a report ID):
    https://www.zotero.org/support/debug_output
  • dannilamb
    I tried an empty document and it was quicker there, though I only added 6 references, whereas there are around 50 in the original document I was having problems with. I'm now on a different machine (more memory, Windows 10) and haven't had any problems with the original document so far, so won't send a debug ID yet. I appreciate a faster machine helps, but the odd thing is the slow down on the machine I was using yesterday and the day before - it started out fine each morning, about the same wait of a second or two as I have on this faster machine, but within a few hours it had slowed down to taking minutes to insert one reference. I had only added around 8-10 references to the document in that time.

    I'll try the original document on the slower machine when I'm back in work on Monday and if I have the same problems I'll send a debug ID.

    Thanks for your help.
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