slowdown/crash when inserting large bibliography

mrichman3 · March 7, 2008

When inserting a large number of works into a Microsoft Word bibliography from Zotero, Word gradually gets slower and slower as more works are added--finally crashing at a certain point if I try to add more. Is there a limit to the number of citations one can put in a bibliography? What can I do to ensure that my document doesn't freeze up?

Thanks!
Matt

marisabrandt · March 15, 2008

I'm having a similar problem. What happens (at least in my case) is that the Firefox memory usage grows dramatically with each citation I insert. I have "overcome" this problem by keeping an eye on my Firefox footprint, and restarting it when it gets too large. (This problem is slightly better in the dev build of the .xpi, by the way.)

roryp · March 16, 2008

I have the same problem. The more citations I add, the slower Zotero and word respond. I am using Word 2007 on Vista. How do I fix this? What is my firefox footprint and how do I keep an eye on it?
R

marisabrandt · March 19, 2008

If you open your windows task manager (ctl-alt-del) and look at "processes," you'll see that you can sort them by "Mem Usage" on the right. I usually just leave it sorted that way, and wait for firefox to double in memory. Once it's doubled, I restart FF, confirm that it's staying fairly low, and carry on editing my document.

This is cumbersome, obviously, but also the only thing that I've found that works.

Tjowens · March 27, 2008

When we move to Zotero 1.5 with Firefox 3 there should be a dramatic shift in speed in Zotero. The improvements in Zotero, alongside the fixed memory issues in Firefox may well clear this up.

marisabrandt · March 27, 2008

I am getting really hammered by the memory issues. Is running a FF3 beta likely to speed things up? In other words, are those fixes already in place in that version of the zotero tree?

Thanks!

dstillman · March 27, 2008

The speed fixes will be in Zotero 1.5 and are only in the Zotero trunk, which is definitely not recommended for end users. We've ported all available Firefox 3 compatibility fixes to the 1.0 branch, so you could try running a Firefox 3 beta with the latest 1.0 development XPI. Since there are still some remaining compatibility issues, we haven't updated the install manifest yet, so you'd have to use the Nightly Tester Tools extension to override the extension compatibility check. And while it sounds like you're already running the dev XPI already, I should mention that, while it is much less likely to do harm than the trunk, it is still not really intended for daily use, so if you were going to try it to see what difference Firefox 3 alone (without the Zotero 1.5 optimizations) makes, I'd recommend doing so in a separate Firefox profile with a copy of your Zotero data directory and separate copies of any Word documents.

Note that we haven't been able to reproduce any of the memory issues you've described, but I'd still be curious if they went away with Firefox 3.

Also, it's possible the Zotero 1.5 speed fixes won't help much with word processor integration performance issues. Improving performance with large documents will likely require changes to the word processor plugins themselves. We're completely rewriting the Mac/Word and OOo plugins (partly to add support for Mac Word 2008) over the next few months, which should speed things up quite a bit, and we should be able to optimize the Windows/Word plugin more as well.

marisabrandt · March 31, 2008

Unfortunately, zotero was becoming pretty much unusable for me before I started using the dev xpi (I'm backing things up nightly, so I can always roll things back a bit if things go wrong on me). The main thing that seems to be better for me in the dev xpi is that, when minimized, firefox is able to reduce its memory footprint, which it seemingly couldn't do with the main build. (This would be with config.trim_on_minimize , not Firefox's default behavior.)

Anything I can do to help you reproduce the memory issues? They are really quite striking an easy to see, but I don't know which aspect of my set-up is causing the problem.