Firefox crashing

jmyers92405
My Firefox crashes when I try to update Zotero. I have updated to the latest version of Firefox (9.0.1). I have uninstalled and reinstalled zotero and am still having crashes. The crash report reads as follows:

AdapterDeviceID: 2992
AdapterVendorID: 8086
Add-ons: zotero@chnm.gmu.edu:2.1.10,{972ce4c6-7e08-4474-a285-3208198ce6fd}:9.0.1
AvailableVirtualMemory: 171704320
BuildID: 20111220165912
CrashTime: 1325874691
EMCheckCompatibility: true

FramePoisonBase: 00000000f0de0000
FramePoisonSize: 65536
InstallTime: 1325856942
Notes: AdapterVendorID: 8086, AdapterDeviceID: 2992, AdapterSubsysID: 2802103c, AdapterDriverVersion: 6.14.10.4764
Has dual GPUs. GPU #2: AdapterVendorID2: 1002, AdapterDeviceID2: 5b63, AdapterSubsysID2: 04301092, AdapterDriverVersion2: 8.360.0.0D3D10 Layers? D3D10 Layers-
D3D9 Layers? D3D9 Layers-

ProductName: Firefox
ReleaseChannel: release
SecondsSinceLastCrash: 524
StartupTime: 1325874257
SystemMemoryUsePercentage: 91
Theme: classic/1.0
Throttleable: 1
TotalVirtualMemory: 2147352576

[extra output removed — D.S.]

I use Zotero for all of my documentation at work and would like a solution to this as soon as possible.

thank you.

Julie Myers
  • dstillman
    Can you be more specific about what's happening?

    http://www.zotero.org/support/reporting_bugs

    And a link to the Mozilla URL for the crash from about:crashes would be helpful.
  • jmyers92405
    the Mozilla crash report URL https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/report/index/bp-12107fa2-efac-4fe3-80c0-50f972120106

    Firefox operates normally when surfing the web. I open Zotero at the bottom of the screen. Zotero opens and starts to sync. After a few seconds I get a (not Responding)in the browser title bar and Firefox closes and a crash report opens (which I attached above).
  • dstillman
    Zotero is performing a very large download of all your library data from the server, and Firefox is crashing because of that. How much RAM do you have on your computer? What version of Windows is this? Have you tried immediately after restarting your computer, with no other software running?
  • jmyers92405
    3.24 GB of RAM, windows XP service pack 3. When trying to sync firefox uses up to 800,000K of memory. I will try syncing without other software running.
  • dstillman
    We see this sometimes on Windows XP, which has worse memory management than more modern (read: not 10-year-old) OSes.

    If syncing without other programs running doesn't work, the next thing to try would be upgrading to the latest Zotero 3.0 beta, which might use less memory. You might also have better luck syncing with Zotero Standalone (which will share the Zotero for Firefox data directory by default).

    If none of that works and you have access to a non-XP machine, you could sync to that and then transfer your data directory over to this computer.
  • dstillman
    (And we can probably reduce the memory footprint of large Zotero syncs in a future version, but that won't help you now. Try 3.0, though.)
  • rwielage
    Hi Dan,
    I work with Julie. We uninstalled Zotero and FireFox this morning, reinstalled it and rebooted. She continued to use the computer, however, to do her work. This has been an on-going issue for her. Firefox/Zotero had been crashing repeatedly so we reinstalled Zotero maybe 3 weeks ago. She uses Chrome instead of Firefox as her default browser, so she hadn't gotten it synced.

    Our library is only 1/4 of what it probably will be a couple years from now. Is this going to be an increasing problem? Most of our computers are Windows 7 with 4-6 gb of memory.

    Thanks,
    Ron
  • rwielage
    Dan, does going to 3.0 involve changes in the database? We have 15 users who share a group database. Would we all have to upgrade? Also, is 3.0 still in beta? Generally we don't use beta software for critical business functions.
  • adamsmith
    3.0 is beta (though will come out of beta almost certainly within a month) but doesn't update the database.
  • rwielage
    Hi Adam,
    Julie rebooted the computer, brought up Firefox, made sure that Zotero was starting to sync and didn't open anything else. It crashed within a couple minutes.

    Can we update her Zotero database from another computer? I don't know if she has much (or anything) in her personal library.

    Ron
  • adamsmith
    rwielage - yes, see Dan's link on manually transferring a library above.
    You can replace her library with someone else's, too, if her private library isn't important.

    If there may be a non-group portion of the library to be preserved, you could set-up a separate FF profile for her on a newer machine, sync there, and then manually transfer.


    Note that if Dan's diagnosis is right, this will not be a recurring problem - the issues is the full (or almost full) sync that's being performed on an old system.
    Gradual syncs, which are the norm when you use auto-sync, use much less memory.
  • dstillman
    edited January 6, 2012
    You can replace her library with someone else's, too, if her private library isn't important.
    That actually probably won't work (at least if you plan to sync using her account). When you change users, Zotero resets the local groups, so you'd probably have the same problem. But you might be able to pull down her library on a non-XP computer and transfer that over. (You can leave file syncing off on the other computer and just transfer the zotero.sqlite database.)

    And note again that 1) this may already be better in 3.0 and 2) we'll likely be able to reduce large-sync memory usage in future versions, so I wouldn't worry about a couple years from now.
  • wielager
    Thanks, guys, for the quick turn around on this issue. We will sync her account on a Windows 7 computer and then transfer the data over.
  • rwielage
    Hi guys. We logged in the user on a Windows 7 computer, installed and setup zotero to sync as the user, and got the full database downloaded. Then we copied it to her computer. We also copied the database to another XP computer that another person helping with the project was using. We setup that installation to also access zotero as the same user.

    Many, many duplicates are now appearing in the user's library. Where did we go wrong and what can we do? There are thousands of duplicates.
  • dstillman
    You would get duplicates if you 1) exported a library as RDF instead of copying the entire data directory as advised above or 2) changed users on a library that already contained many of the same items (and clicked past the prompt warning you that it would merge the libraries).

    On the server in jmyers92405's library I see 423 items with a Date Added of "2012-01-11 21:24:30". I believe that would only happen if you used export/import.

    You should be able to delete at least those duplicates all together by sorting the library by Date Added. If there are others, and one computer still has the correct info, you could temporarily disable auto-sync on it via Tools -> Add-ons -> Extensions -> Zotero before opening the Zotero pane (to keep it from pulling down the duplicates) and then use the reset options, but that's considerably more complicated.
  • rwielage
    jmyers figured out to sort by date the collections she was most interested in and deleted everything added on that date. That was actually a pretty easy fix. If you're seeing only 423 items she has already deleted around 2500 items. Are there about 3500 items still there?

    We just moved the entire library - everything in and under the zotero directory. It seems like somehow it picked up that it was from another user. Is the Firefox profile number in the database? Should we have moved the entire Firefox profile?
  • dstillman
    She has about 6000 top-level items on the server. She might not have synced the deletions to the server yet.

    Moving the Zotero data directory is the correct thing to do, but again, for hundreds of items to have the same Date Added one really had to have used import/export. Those 423 items are the only ones added to the server this month, though. All others were from last year, so whatever caused the rest of the duplicates didn't happen from anything you did this week.

    In any case, I can't tell you what happened before, but due to the way it works, syncing is incapable of producing duplicates on its own. The only causes are export/import, merging users (and clicking past the warning), and upgrading a Zotero 1.0 database to Zotero 2+ independently and syncing it (since the identifiers that prevent duplicates were added in Zotero 2.0).
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