Zotero runs very slow for inserting references, urgent

Marius297

Dear all,

first of all, I am a big fan of Zotero! Love working with it. Thank you for providing such a helpful tool!
But since I am writing on my dissertation, the program went from being fast and usable, to being pretty slow and now to being almost unusable.

So, the problem is that I try to insert a new reference within the text and the loading bar just stays at the end and I have to wait for easily more than 10 or more minutes until the new reference is inserted. I could wait for 10-15 seconds but 10 or more minutes interrupts my workflow too much.
I had a look around here in the forum and elsewhere but nothing helped... (Unchecking automatic updates, etc). However, I did not copy the content of the document into a new word file - I am too afraid of ruining the format I've been working on...

It becomes pretty frustrating... Also resetting the "automatic updates" takes very very long and Zotero seems to be frozen for quite some time. Saw some users posting their debug ID. So, I enabled the logging too and this is the ID without trying to insert a new reference but by reactivating automatic updates (and I do no know whether it is set again to switched on or switched off. -> D1298621130

Hope that by now a solution for this problem is available.

I am using Word for Mac in Version 16.40 on a MacBook Pro (late 2011) with macOS High Sierra in 10.13.6, 16 GB RAM and a 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7. Zotero is also updated to the latest version.
The size of the document is now 268 pages. In my Zotero library are 367 items but I guess half of them are not within the document.

Hoping to get a solution to work again in my main document and that there is no need for a side document to work with the references.


Unfortunately, to solve this problem is quite urgent for me. Please tell me about a solution.

Looking forward hearing from you!

Best,
Marius

adomasven

You don't have to reactive the automatic updates at any point, but if you choose to do that the operation will be slow. You only need to use the Refresh command in the Zotero plugin to update the document after having the automatic updates disabled.

Looking at your current submitted log it does look like some operations are a bit slow. Unfortunately, MacWord integration was quite slow with High Sierra and there is little we can do to improve that. The solution to improve performance is to upgrade to Catalina. Unfortunately with an early 2011 Mac that is not an option.

A document with 268 is quite substantial in size and some slowdown is inevitable. Based on your debug log you have 300 citations in there. The recommendation beyond disabling automatic citation updates if you are experiencing slowness is to split your document up into chapters and work on them separately and then merge them in the end.

You may submit a Debug ID of a normal citation insertion with automatic citation updates disabled, but is unlikely we will be able to offer anything beyond splitting the doc into multiple smaller pieces.

Marius297

Thank you very much for your quick response! I really do appreciate such great support!

Then I have to do what I actually wanted to avoid... Will do the split now and see. I already tried to insert a citation into a completely empty file and it is there within a second. So, it should be alright then.

Do you recommend me to insert a bibliography for each chapter or not and just within the final document where everything is combined?
Or something like that:
Chapter 1 without Bibliography
Chapter 2 without Bibliography
Chapter X without Bibliography
Last chapter with Bibliography

Thanks a gain for your prompt help!

Best,
Marius

adomasven

It's fine to keep a bibliography for each chapter, but you should remove those before recombining the document. You can either keep the bibliography of the last chapter or simply reinsert it. The end result will be identical.