Slow performance / D171469570

Pascah
Good day.

I am currently using Zotero on my macook air and are experiencing a loss of performance / speed when using "add citation" or when ammending ciations.

Any help and support is appreciated.
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  • dstillman
    I don't see an attempt to add a citation in that debug output — it appears to just be for Zotero startup. Can you try again, and generate output only for the insert attempt?

    Also, how many citations do you have in the document?
  • Pascah
    Good evening, please check this error 164079806. I added one citation and had to wait and wait ...

    thanks for your support.
    Pascal
  • Pascah
    Oh I do have more than 200 citation in my Phd thesis.
  • Pascah
    and one more 627520192
  • dstillman
    Those are Report IDs. For this we'll need a Debug ID like you provided initially.
  • Pascah
    Good day, thanks for teh quick feedback. I hope this Debug ID will help you to locate the issue. D1665954782.

    Thanks for teh support.

    Pascal
  • dstillman
    (3)(+0005262): Integration: Retrieved 227 fields in 182.992; 1.240491387601644 fields/second
    @adomasven will need to look at this.
  • adomasven
    Yes, this looks unusually slow. Which year MacBook is this? What version of Word are you running (such as 16.21). Did you update Word recently? Does it get better after restarting the computer?
  • Pascah
    Good morning I am running a mac book Air from 2015, 1.6GHZ Intel .... 8GB , the WOrd version is 16.23.

    Thanks in advance for your support.
  • Pascah


    The performance of the initial one or two citations is typically faster but not always.
  • Pascah
    Please see the following error report, an uncaught exception was reported. Report ID 50565837.

    [JavaScript Error: "uncaught exception: 2147500034" {file: "chrome://zotero/content/xpcom/integration.js" line: 197}]

    I sincerely hope that this hint is an advantage for you to resolve the topic.

    I used Zotero citations today and it seems that the performance did improve, but unfortunately just for the first 2-3 citations.

    Thanks , Pascal
  • Pascah
    and another one 1699585567
  • adomasven
    Does it get better after restarting your computer and without any other apps beside Zotero and Word running?
  • Pascah
    Good morning and a happy Easter to you. I am sitting in front of my Mac but the performance did not really improve. Please see the Debug ID, the time needed to perform was 212 seconds.

    D1933155901

    Thanks in advance.
  • Pascah
    I did restart again, the performance was like in the good old days. Please review

    D109612453
  • Pascah
    Sorry to bother you again, the second citation after the restart was slow again. Please review D1189300710.

    Thanks
  • Pascah
    and another one, I made a break for about an hour, the next citation was slow again

    D551126695
  • fbennett
    @Pascah Sorry to intrude, but it's not mentioned in the thread so I'll ask. What is your Zotero version?
  • Pascah
    Zotero version is 5.0.66,
    Zotero Word Mac Integration 5.0.18.SA.5.0.66, extension
    Mac OS 10.14


    D2006273684 151 seconds after restart
  • adomasven
    Do you run any security software? Does anything else on this Mac run considerably slower than normal aside from Zotero? Does Word feel any more sluggish than usually?
  • Pascah
    I do not run a security software on my Mac. The Performance of Word is slow when the issue with Zotero are occurring.
    Otherwise the Mac works well as well for SPSS and huge excel files.

    Hope that helps
  • Pascah
    Good day and here another one D896406465, it was the first citation today. I would appreciate if you could give me a heads up if it is still worthwhile continuing with Zotero or should I start to use another citation program?

    Thanks for an honest answer
  • fbennett
    What I have sometimes recommended to students on Mac OS and Word when they encounter speed issues is that they install Parallels, Windows, and the Windows version of Office, and run Zotero + Word in that. It sounds bizarre, but Word for Mac is a different program, and it seems to have problems.
    https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/306062/#Comment_306062
  • adomasven
    I am afraid there is limited advise we can give you based on these debug logs. The citing is indeed very slow and while Mac Word is generally much slower than the Windows counterpart (to the extent that fbennett's advice above does produce a significant increase in performance), it should not be as slow as it is. You could try looking at your CPU and Memory usage via the Process Monitor when working with Zotero to see if anything odd is happening, but otherwise we can only suggest that something on this computer is interfering with the proper functioning of Zotero Word integration. In normal conditions on a document with some 200 citations (and assuming it is about 100, but not 1000 pages long) it should be 5 or 10 times faster than what you are experiencing.
  • Pascah
    Thank you for coming back to me. Should I reinstall Zotero and the Word connector?

    Can I deinstall Zotero without risking the proper usage of the PhD thesis ?

    Thanks
  • adomasven
    In this situation reinstalling Zotero, Word or the Word plugin will not likely yield any results. Reinstalling Zotero or the Zotero Word plugin will not interfere with you working on your thesis. If possible you can try running Windows in a virtual machine environment on your MacBook, try to get access to a Windows machine with an installation of Office or even try another MacBook.
  • Pascah
    Thank you, I just review the CPU activity during the "adding a citation" process. It seems that Word is eating up almost 100% of the activity. I will deinstall Word and start again.
    The CPU was max. 27% used.

    Thank you anyway for the friendly assistance.
  • Pascah
    Good morning over the pond.
    I have been reinstalling Word and Zotero with no difference in performance.

    BUT when I'm adding citations or even with up to 5 sources in one and if I "wait" or delay to press the "enter" button the speed is back to normal, which seems to me like a step on the moon from what I was used. This acceleration definitely helps. This approach does work consistently. I used this method now for the 5th time.

    Maybe that is giving you some food for thought to improve the connectivity between MAC/ Word and Zotero.

    Thanks
  • adomasven
    The operation that is making things slow for you is fetching all the citations in the document when citing (this is required for every citation operation because there is no way for Zotero to know if citations have been removed or copied in from somewhere in between interactions). When you press Add/edit citation, the citation dialog is displayed and you interact with it Zotero is fetching the citations in the background. If you press Enter immediately then the fetching continues, after which Zotero updates your document and the progress bar disappears. If you wait with the citing dialog open then the fetching of citations might complete in the background, or may at least have less work remaining and thus the rest of the process appears faster.
  • Pascah
    Good day, I am finalising my diss in the next weeks and I am concerned about the Bibliography at the final stage.
    New citations take me up to 20 minutes in my 300 pages 30 MB document.

    Do you have any recommendation for me or a work around to secure a proper Bibliography in my doc ?
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