Extreme lags in 5.0.88 on mac

paulgowder

Hi there,

I've noticed that basic Zotero functionality has seemed to have gotten almost unusably slow at the moment on mac. As in, I'll be editing an item, and there will be a noticable lag between doing something like typing an author's name and the keystrokes showing up in the app---and I actually have experienced keystrokes being dropped altogether.

Is anyone else seeing this?

(My configuration: a very fast machine (current i9 MBP 16, 32 gb ram, etc.; everything else runs at blazing speed; slowness persists after a reboot, running MacOS 10.15.5); a very large zotero library (I recently upgraded my storage quota to unlimited, because the 6gb was too small); only extensions I'm using are zotfile and better bibtex, and better bibtex is auto-saving a couple of large collections.

paulgowder

On further exploration, this seems to be about editing authors in particular---the autocomplete functionality is taking a looot of resources. Is there a way to just turn that off?

dstillman

How many items in your database? Do you have any items with huge numbers (e.g., 100s) of authors?

Can you provide a Debug ID for an operation that's slow?

paulgowder

Thanks dstillman---I have 10,338 items in the database, and I'm having a little bit of problem reproducing reliably---the lag comes and goes. But I got a little bit of the lag in my second editing of the author of an entry I just edited, with debug ID D104849888

paulgowder

And no, nothing with huge numbers of authors. Another piece of information that might be useful is that this happened most recently in the wake of using the PDF import functionality to add and automatically identify a moderate number (~40) of files. After automatic identification, I left the results window open to see the files that couldn't be identified, and manually created parent items for each of those; it was that process where I saw the really massive slowdown earlier today.

emilianoeheyns

Auto-saving large collections will use memory (for a 10k library I'd expect some 5m to be in use) but unless you edit items frequently, it shouldn't really be problematic in terms of responsiveness. On my test service (not slow machines but certainly not incredibly high-specced machines), 24k items takes 8 seconds but on a background thread, so it should not affect Zotero use (much).

edit: and during editing you shouldn't see any performance hit at all. BBT delays auto-exports until 1 sec (configurable) after the last edit of an item that affects that export, although it can't stop exports once running. But to make sure, you could either set autoExportDelay to something large (60 means a full minute), or set auto-export to 'on-idle'.

dstillman

@paulgowder: Can you confirm whether this happens with BBT disabled?

emilianoeheyns

If BBT is involved, I'd very much appreciate it if you could open a GH issue. BBT should no longer be the cause of performance problems.