Zotero very slow

warrengc
I have just moved from Papers, but I am finding Zotero almost unusable. I have a big reference collection - over 6000 references, but was encouraged by the unlimited storage option (which I have paid for). But now, when I use the program, I mostly stare at a spinning beachball. It can take 2-3 minutes to do something very simple. I have two computers—one a late model Macbook Prop and a relatively recent iMac. They have the same issues. Is the library just too big? Or can anyone suggest a solution?
  • dstillman
    6,000 isn't particularly big, though you'll want to make sure you're checking the total count, including child items.

    And then we'll want to see a Debug ID for an individual operation that's slow.
  • warrengc
    Thanks for your response. I just submitted a log. This was to delete a PDF that had not indexed. Took about 3 minutes to complete the operation. The ID is D433238305. When I click on My Library, I get a read of 6692 items - not sure whether that is referring to all items including child items. Thanks again
  • adamsmith
    You'll want to expand all items for the full item count as described in the 2nd paragraph of the documentation dstillman links to (https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/item_count )
  • dstillman
    @warrengc: You didn't say how many total items, but if you're still having trouble, it looks like there was a huge amount of Better BibTeX activity in there, so disable that temporarily and try again.
  • damina
    @dstillman: Thanks a million. My Zotero is now functioning faster. Bless you!
  • emilianoeheyns
    What kind of activity? If you just start with BBT there will be a lot of activity for generating fresh citekeys, but after that it should mostly get out of the way.
  • emilianoeheyns
    The only thing I can think of offhand that would cause a lot of BBT activity for the deletion of a single PDF is auto-export. But even that shouldn't take 3 minutes for 6k items as it's heavily cached.
  • emilianoeheyns
    But if BBT introduces a major performance problem I'd love to look into that. Would it be possible/prudent for me to get a copy of D433238305?
  • dstillman
    We can't share that, but @warrengc can generate debug output, save it to a file (rather than generating a Debug ID), and email it to you.
  • emilianoeheyns
    Or use the bbt error log facility. I don't mind either way as long as I can look into the problem.

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