very slow loading of Zotero 5

cnewf

since the upgrade to standalone, forced by a Firefox update to 57, my library has been clunky, slow, unreliable, and frustrating to use. I sometimes have to relaunch Zotero a couple of times to get the entries in various folders to appear. I've done all the usual stuff-restarted the computer, closed other applications, repaired the disk, etc (Mac OS 10.12.6), posted to the discussion. It's still not working as well as it did a few weeks ago. Basically Zotero is for me, for the moment, a crappier product whose use I am now minimizing.

adamsmith

I see two other posts by you since you moved to Zotero 5, in both you confirm the issue reported no longer appears for you. If that's not the case, you'd actually have to report the issues you're experiencing with some details -- this is too vague to be actionable.

dstillman

(And one was for an issue outside of Zotero. The other sounds closer to what's described here, but we'd need more info on the current problem, as well as the Debug ID requested there if the problem is still occurring.)

cnewf

i'm just reporting one user's degraded performance with Zotero 5.

dstillman

That's not something we can do anything with. If you're having a specific problem and you want it fixed, we need a report of exactly what's happening.

If you're saying that Zotero startup is slow for you, we'd need a Debug ID for the startup using the "Restart with Logging Enabled…" option.

Melone

Hi everyone,

I just found this thread and am having similar issues. I just updated to OS High Sierra then to Zotero 5.0.33.

I must second cnewf on this. After the update Zotero is extremely slow and unstable. Perhaps is the combination between High Sierra (not the most stable OS update) and Zotero, I don't know...

Zotero takes its time (10minutes at least) to launch and load the library and very often is unresponsive even to basic operations.

A couple of examples. If I add a new item (either manually or through Firefox connector) and/or use 'tab' to go from one field to another it is unresponsive; or if I do right-click to move to trash something, again unresponsive; if I enter author's surname/name, again unresponsive. All this does not occur systematically nor always, but very often.

@dstillman: I followed your suggestion to cnwef and restarted Zotero (twice) with logging enabled. Below my Debug IDs, really hope these issues can be solved

Debug ID: D698531590

Debug ID: D1431120781

dstillman

User interface ready in 257399 ms

User interface ready in 15725 ms

Melone: Your Debug IDs show Zotero taking ~4.25 minutes and ~16 seconds to start up, respectively, followed by ~40 seconds each time to check all local files for modifications during the startup auto-sync (which shouldn't freeze the UI). Four minutes is certainly too long, but at least in these examples it doesn't appear to be taking 10 minutes, and the second one is much more reasonable for a large database.

What kind of Mac is this? Do you have an SSD or a spinning hard drive? If you didn't do anything else in between those launches, the most likely explanation for this is very slow disk access, with the database cached in memory by macOS for the second startup. So you might see ~4 minutes for the first start of Zotero after you start up your computer, but then have it be much faster for subsequent startups (depending on how much RAM you have and how many other programs you run in between).

Another thing you can try is clicking Check Data Integrity in the Advanced → Files and Folders pane of the Zotero preferences. In addition to checking for problems, that also rebuilds your database, and it's possible it could make things faster. That command can take a very long time to run, so only start it when you can leave Zotero alone for a while (or overnight).

We're going to see what we can do to speed up cold startup (i.e., the first one above) for larger libraries.

A couple of examples. If I add a new item (either manually or through Firefox connector) and/or use 'tab' to go from one field to another it is unresponsive; or if I do right-click to move to trash something, again unresponsive; if I enter author's surname/name, again unresponsive. All this does not occur systematically nor always, but very often.

This is all pretty odd, so it might be worth leaving debug output logging running and submitting it right after you encounter something that was much slower than expected.

dstillman

(Or you might have just had something extremely CPU- or disk-intensive running in the background during the first startup. You'd be able to tell with Activity Monitor. And doing another two startups after restarting your computer (with Zotero closed) would give us some idea whether it's disk speed + disk cache.)

dstillman

@Melone: Actually, hold off on running Check Database Integrity. I'll have a beta version soon that might speed things up for you (and others with older Zotero databases) after running that, so no need to run that twice.

paoloaranha

@dstillman , is there any update on the beta version that could speed up cold startups? I am also having a frustrating experience in dealing with my Zotero database's slow startup.

Babak Bahaddin

Hello,

I would appreciate your help.

Here is my ID:
D2016942840