Zotero is a great piece of software but slow and clunky

dannyil

I have a decent mbp 2017 15" 16 Gb RAM, i7 4-cores
It is not a slow machine
It is running the latest version of Big Sur 11.15.1 at the time of writing
I'm using Word for Mac and the file has over 500 citations with 300 bibliographic entries. Inserting a citation takes a good 2 minutes. It is slow.
In the end, following some comments in the forums, I switched to Windows and Word for Windows, It is not much better and still takes too much time (about 1 minute). If I insert 30 citations a day, that's already 30 minutes of work wasted.
It is easy to simply blame the add in on Microsoft, but as a seasoned developer myself, I know that there are ways to improve speed and usability. Please test your product on a 20 Mb word file with 1000s of citations and see how the speed is. There has to be a better way to improve inserting the citations and bibliography.

dstillman

as a seasoned developer myself, I know that there are ways to improve speed and usability

Great, then submit a patch. Otherwise, you have no idea what you're talking about.

Word for Mac is drastically slower than Word for Windows for what Zotero needs to do. We get very few complaints about the speed of Word integration on Windows, even with very large documents.

For a large document, disable automatic updates and inserting a citation should be more or less instantaneous, at least on Windows.

DWL-SDCA

MacWord and large documents is terribly slow even when Zotero isn't used. Word for Windows with Zotero works great on a Mac that has Boot Camp or an emulator such as Parallels. Word for Windows on an Intel Mac is quite fast (even with a large Zotero document with many citations).

dannyil

@dstillman I'm using Word for Windows and it's still slow
so perhaps you should submit a patch, maybe you do have no idea what you're talking about

@DWL-SDCA I'm using Parallels and the performance improvement is minimal

dstillman

First, you're going to need to drop the attitude or you're going to be banned from posting here. If you're having a problem, just report it politely like every other person who posts here and we'll do our best to help. Don't come here and tell us we haven't tested or optimized our own software.

As I say, if it's a large document, you should disable automatic citation updates.

If it's still slow with citation updates disabled on Windows, that would be very unusual in a document of that size, and we'd want a Debug ID for an operation that was slow.

dannyil

I didn't say you didn't optimize or test - obviously you did those things; but shifting the blame on to other makers of software is not polite either.

I will try that thank you for the suggestion.

dstillman

I didn't say you didn't optimize or test

You: "Please test your product"

shifting the blame on to other makers of software is not polite either

It has nothing to do with politeness — it's explaining where the problem lies so that people have realistic expectations and they don't, say, think we can fix something that we can't fix. Again, if you think we're wrong, you're welcome to dig into the code and identify a way to improve it. Otherwise, as a seasoned developer you surely know it's obnoxious to come into an open-source project and assert without any evidence that there's a better way to do something.

emilianoeheyns

@danyll dstillman is on the zotero dev team. He knows what goes on under the hood and where the bottlenecks lie. Saying "there are ways to speed it up" makes you sound like a CSI actor demanding "enhance that bit of footage" - convincing to an outsider, not to seasoned experts.

Instead of just saying "you guys are incompetent and lazy", try inquiring where the actual problem is rather than assuming it's not there. Even if you don't submit a patch (and tbh,from where I stand it doesn't sound like you have the requisite expertise, maybe I'm jumping to conclusions here, but that seems to be in vogue on this thread) at least any remaining critique comes from actual insight rather than arrogant assumptions.

I am *not* on the dev team, but I am a seasoned dev, and have been schooled by Dan on many a fine occasion. He knows what he's talking about.

adomasven

@dannyil As the primary dev of the word processor extensions I'd like you to know (or rather to reiterate the point, and if you read other forum threads on this issue you would have seen me say it) that I have personally spent countless hours that over the last 5 years would probably amount to weeks of dev time profiling (as well as time off-work cycling, in the shower, commuting, etc. thinking about) the Word for Mac integration specifically to improve its performance and stability. It was bad around 2016-2018. Then we basically received no complaints between 2019 and 2020 about performance, this was without any specific improvements on our end over that time, and then at the end of 2020 we started seeing the issue come up a lot again. The performance of the APIs which we use to interface with Word are a function of Apple's AppleEvent performance and the implementation of AppleEvent handlers on Microsoft's end. And given the drastic variation of the integration speed based on no changes on our end over the past years we have to at least point out that this isn't just within our hands and that it can be fast with the code that we have, if Apple and Microsoft cared to make it so. There are no low-hanging apples or even medium difficulty ideas that we have not tried for how to improve the speed in a meaningful way. On the other hand, we have promises from Microsoft to add functionality to their JS plugin API, which will allow us to port our plugin and hopefully drastically improve the performance on macOS (as well as allow to support integration on Word Online, Word for iOS and others). The other word processor integrations are also receiving the necessary attention although none of them, not even Google Docs are quite as slow as Mac Word. I do routinely test the integrations with documents that contain hundreds of pages and citations which often push the limits of the word processors themselves. And we certainly cannot be faster than the Word processors themselves.

I'm sure you didn't know at least some of what I wrote above, but most seasoned Zotero forums community members as well as the internal team are well aware of the situation. So yes, your initial post is arrogant in light of the above and the correct answer to it is indeed "Great, please submit a patch". As someone who has agonized over this a countless number of hours I'd be the first one to applaud and merge it.

dannyil

@dstillman I'm sorry I offended you. I didn't mean to. I see now thanks to @adomasven's comments that it was arrogant.
I don't want to discount the hundreds of hours you've all spent on this. Thank you.
Of course it's appreciated.
Thank you for outlining the issues.

xxtraloud

@adomasven I have noticed that searching in the Word add-on is becoming slower. My database has ~2500 papers, now when I add/edit a citation it takes about 2-4 seconds to get the results, it was almost instantaneous a few months ago and my database hasn't grown much. I have an i7 9th gen, plenty of ram, SSD, Win 10, Word 2019. What could cause this delay? Is it possible to use an indexing such as Search Everything?