Slow tags when using "better Bibtex for Zotero" plugin

dsimat

Hello,

Is anyone else observing that tagging items seems to take ages if you have a lot of tags and the "better Bibtex" plugin installed?

Debug ID: D27349396

dstillman

The BBT developer, @emilianoeheyns, would have to look into that (and won't be able to look at a Zotero debug log, but I think there's a similar reporting mechanism for BBT).

emilianoeheyns

There is indeed -- I get the most information if you first enable debug logging from the help menu (which will affect performance in itself because BBT is *very* chatty in debug mode). There is a "Report BetterBibTeX errors" option in the help menu right under the "Report Errors" (the latter going to the Zotero developers). If the Debug report is "D[lots of numbers]", that goes to the Zotero developers, if it's "[6 alphanumeric characters]-[apse or euc]" it goes to me.

The number of tags in Zotero really shouldn't matter to BBT. If you're actively tagging and you have large auto-exports set up, that might affect performance, but even then the cache should ameliorate that significantly.

dsimat

Thanks. I've sent the error report (ID: 8IBHPVCR-euc).

emilianoeheyns

From what I see, you have a collection set up for auto-export that has about 3.5k items in it. When you are changing items, BBT will wait up to one second to see if you're going to make more changes, then kicks off the auto-export. Exports in Zotero are synchronous, so while they're running, Zotero will stall -- there's nothing I can do about this, but even then I think your export is taking too long; I see it took some 36 seconds to finish, even with about 2/3 of the export coming from the cache, and that can't be right.

Applying tags may well take longer than one second between two tags being applied, so you'd be seeing a lot of large exports happening. I'll make that delay configurable, but for now, I'd advice setting auto-export to Idle rather than On-change in your case.

WRT the 36-second export, can you turn on debug output logging if it isn't on, then go into the BBT preferences and kick off the auto-export you have manually twice (letting the first finish before you kick off the second), and submit a new BBT error report (preferably on a new issue on https://github.com/retorquere/zotero-better-bibtex/issues TBH -- it's the most convenient place for me to do support)?

dsimat

Hello and sorry for the delay.

I have submitted a new error report: Y5FQUNB3-euc

I also started a GitHub issue, as requested.

https://github.com/retorquere/zotero-better-bibtex/issues/1125

emilianoeheyns

Turns out it was related to JabRef-4 compatible export, which doesn't use the cache. I've added a warning in the preferences discouraging use of JR4-compatible exports.