Problems with "Duplicate Items"

JVCSJ

I am being unable to use Zotero for many hours now. I activated «Duplicate Items» and everything is blocked since then. The computer was active an entire night. No results. It happened before, but after some time, things came to normal. Not this time. PLEASE, help the best you you can. Thank you!

JVCSJ

Report ID: 162292508

dstillman

Just force-quit Zotero.

JVCSJ

I have the «old» problem once again, as I activated (even if I was trying to avoid it) the function «Duplicate Items». I force-quit Zotero several times; I left it working for an entire night, and the situation is the same old paralysis: I am unable to work, Zotero seems to be working in the background, but the program is unavailable to me. I got the following ID: Submitted with Debug ID D963321584. This is very worrisome to me and I continue to wonder: 1/ How to solve the present problem of being unable to work; 2/ How to avoid the problem at all. Something is not in order, but I cannot figure out what it is. I trust once again that Help will come my way. I really need it. Thank you! [Submitted with Debug ID D963321584].

dstillman

Can you provide a Debug ID for Zotero startup through clicking on Duplicate Items, using the "Restart with Logging Enabled…" option?

JVCSJ

Did as requested, but cannot receive any Debug ID. Kindly guide me through this. [I shall be absent now for about two hours, or a bit less. Thank you!]

dstillman

cannot receive any Debug ID

What do you mean by that?

JVCSJ

Sorry for my delay. What I mean is:
1/ I clicked on «Duplicate Items» (became blue)
2/ I activated again "Restart with Logging Enabled"
3/ After all this time (as of yesterday afternoon) I cannot access my folders;
4/ If I restart Zotero it says «version is active, and I follow the instruction;
5/ Zotero continues to open, but does not allow me to access my folders.
6/ The MEssage in the second column is: «loading items»...

Unfortunately, I do not know what to do in order to get the DEBUG ID you require. Kindly help. Thank you.

JVCSJ

Sorry, here it is:

D2085632886

dstillman

That's not a Debug ID from Zotero startup or for anything related to Duplicate Items.

When you choose "Restart with Logged Enabled…", it should prompt you to restart Zotero. Do that, and then click on Duplicate Items to reproduce the problem you're experiencing, and then submit the output.

JVCSJ

Thank you. It so happens that soon after I sent you the Debug ID above, the «DUplicate Items» function worked once again. Please, allow me to ask the following:

1/ Since a couple of weeks now, whenever I activate «Duplicate Items» the program appears to freeze, but in fact it keeps running. Problem is that I cannot access any of my folders. This last time the entire process, that is, until, I could get back to my work, took around 15-20 hours.
2/ A you certainly understand, I am worried about this problem. Needless to say that to see that list of items to be cleaned was a great joy. But I would like to understand the following: is this a «normal» problem? Is there anything I can do to avoid it? Indeed, I am uncertain if the solution came because the program needed all that time and the many starts/restarts I did, or, at the end, I had done something right that could have avoided the entire process of waiting endless hours to be able to work normally with Zotero.
3/ I would appreciate if you could help me either understand the reason for the problem, which I am suspecting has to do with the size of My Library, and, if possible, certify that this kind of problem does not necessarily endanger the security of my data.
I am very grateful for your assistance. Thank you so much!

dstillman

How many items do you have in your library?

Duplicate Items certainly shouldn't take hours to load.

JVCSJ

I have about 160K items. The program went back to «Duplicate Items» and the problem started again. The program is also crashing. I keep making it start again. What can be done to avoid/solve this problem? Please, help.

dstillman

Oh, that's a huge number of items. (With child items, you likely have twice that.)

I'm afraid the best answer, for now, is not to use Duplicate Items. Once you actually load it, you can right-click on it and hide it from view to prevent you from clicking on it accidentally.

We may be able to improve the performance of Duplicate Items in a future version.

JVCSJ

I really hope improvements/solutions will be available. In the last 20 hours I am having the problem again («Duplicates» was activated without my pressing the bottom; perhaps the program confused some shortcut I unintentionally did). I am in a still-stand once again. Is there a way of veryfying directly what the problem actually is? And how to solve it? How to go about the problem besides your recommendation? Actually, I had tried it before, but I did not manage to hid the Duplicate Items bottom. THe other below, yes; not that one. Why is that?

dstillman

Is there a way of veryfying directly what the problem actually is?

The problem is just that the feature doesn't work on a library the size of yours. I'm afraid there's no other answer here. There are optimizations we can likely make to make this scale to very large libraries, but I don't know when that will happen.

To hide it without needing to load the list first, restart Zotero and load your library normally. Then go to the Config Editor in the Advanced pane of the preferences. Right-click on any line and select New → String. Enter extensions.zotero.duplicateLibraries for the preference name and { "1": false } for the value. Then restart Zotero. "Duplicate Items" should be hidden. You can show it again in the future by right-clicking on the library root.