How many papers can Zotero standalone handle?

bobFish
Hi,

I would like to know how many papers Zotero Standalone can handle before it starts to negatively affect performance.

Thanks!
Ofer
  • adamsmith
    That depends on a number of things: How fast is your computer? are you going to index the full text of the papers? At what point exactly do you consider a slight slowing down on some behaviors "negatively affect performance"? etc.
    5000 is no problem. 10,000 usually isn't. With >20,000 you'll likely see some effects, especially if you keep indexing enabled.
  • bobFish
    Thanks for answering my question!

    >How fast is your computer?
    I have a desktop PC with an i7 930 2.8GHz quad code CPU, and 8GB ram.

    >At what point exactly do you consider a slight slowing down on some behaviors "negatively affect performance"?
    Loading folders to view, using search.
  • adamsmith
    you should be fine until a pretty high number - start-up will take a little longer with a huge library. Full text search will take a little longer with a lot of full text to go through (but the default quick search should still be very fast). Loading your full library will with, say, 20k files, will likely take 5-10 secs, though - that is, every time you switch to it.
  • bobFish
    Sounds great!
    Thanks!
  • jacekg
    I have a similar question. I currently have ~3000 items in my Zotero bibliography (using it inside Firefox), which I access on several different computers (e.g., a fast Mac OS X, a slow Windows PC). Sometimes I experience slowness, esp with updates to the database - my database is in my cloud, that is, I setup WebDAV. The size of my WebDAV folder is currently about 1.5GB. How is performance going to be affected if I keep adding items including full text PDFs? thanks - Jacek
  • adamsmith
    Mostly the same answer as above. Zotero performs fine with >10k items with attachments and full text indexing, though depending on how old your Windows PC is you'll see some slowness. I'm not sure what you mean by database updates, but adding items will sometimes slow Firefox/Zotero because of the indexing process. I understand that there are plans to move indexing to the background to avoid that.

    Whether you use file sync or not doesn't affect performance one way or the other.
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