slow loading articles

rgaster5

any idea why clicking on articles in Zotero loads some of them extremely slowly (and much slower than loading the URL directly). Error seems to suggest that Z is scanning through emplty fields for some reason

Report ID 496135120

dstillman

I'm not totally sure what you mean by this. What do you mean by loading?

https://www.zotero.org/support/reporting_problems#provide_steps_to_reproduce

rgaster5

so when I click on an article within zotero, my browser tries to load the local copy (stored at D:/zotero etc). the browser is so slow to load that it's faster to go back, copy the original web URL, paste that into another browser and load that instead,

the browser typically says "resolving host: while trying to load, and the error message from Zotero seems to indicate that it is having trouble trying to read fields in the article record.

fairly frequently (1 in 10?) the article fails to load altogether from the Zotero location

dstillman

What's an example URL where this happens? At the point when you're loading a snapshot, Zotero isn't involved at all — they're just saved files on disk, the same as if you'd used "Save As…" in your browser and opened it from the file manager. Unfortunately these days many websites are just too dynamic and complex to be loaded from a local copy in this way, so weird problems aren't that unexpected (which is why a future version of Zotero will likely default to reader-mode-style simplified snapshots).

rgaster5

well that does make sense. here's an example
https://www.brookings.edu/research/tracking-the-gig-economy-new-numbers/

I wonder if there is a way in the settings to have Zotero load the web URL rather than the snapshot?

rgaster5

BTW I very much like the new connector for chrome that allows me to specify which Zotero folder to save a link to, Excellent improvement

dstillman

If a snapshot is present it will load that, but you can just click on the URL label in the right-hand pane. You can also of course disable webpage snapshots in the General pane of the preferences.

But that snapshot also loads perfectly fine for me. If that's consistently not working for you, I'd guess that the actual problem here is some sort of browser extension, security software, or network setup that's interfering with either the saving or the loading. One easy thing to try is using Show File and then opening the snapshot in another browser.

rgaster5

OK thanks - you've prob spent enough time on this. the URL link is a perfectly adequate solution that I hadnt noticed before

RobertJSawyer

Just FYI, I'm a new user and noticing this exact same behavior with this article:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-wolves-really-became-dogs-180970014/

Chrome browser, Windows 7 32-bit. Chrome status line says:

Waiting for sp.analytics.yahoo.com ...

and/or:

Waiting for adservice.google.com ...

I don't use Yahoo for anything, and it's not my default search engine in either my browser or Zotero.

dstillman

There are sites that do some complicated things with JavaScript that can cause weird behavior when saved and loaded locally. As I say above, Zotero's current snapshot approach is the same as using "Save Page As" in your browser, and you would likely see similar behavior if you saved from Firefox or Chrome, but we're planning to switch to a different process in a future version that saves the final, static page without scripts or external resources.