long delays, slow response

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  • adamsmith
    closing the tag selector on the left may speed things up. There is no easy way to remove all tags, no.
  • toms-library
    Wow! Closing the tag selector completely eliminated the delays switching between collections. It also dramatically reduced the initial loading time when I start up Zotero. Wonderful!

    I tried the dbfix, but it didn't fix the delay problem when the tag selector was open.

    So it looks like the tags are the issue (for me at least).

    I just did a search regarding removing zotero tags, and found this:
    https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/4051/remove-all-tags/

    I may try removing the tags manually from the sqlite database using one of the methods suggested. If so, I'll report back about whether that worked.
  • adamsmith
    I'd be _very_ careful directly editing your sqlite. It'd be much better and probably not very hard to delete tags via the javascript API with executeJS
    https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/client_coding/javascript_api
  • toms-library
    Hmmm. executeJS seems to be a firefox add-on? Firefox doesn't work on my system (for some reason), so that is out. It also looks a bit daunting, judging from the javascript api site you pointed me to.

    What are your worries about editing sqlite? Is it really that delicate?
  • adamsmith
    Zotero has built in protections that make sure you don't do anything with your library that's illegal. By directly editing the sqlite you circumvent those protections. In most cases that would probably show pretty quickly and since you'd only ever do this with a copy of the sqlite you should be fine simply restoring if it doesn't work. But it's certainly possible that you could do something that causes a problem that will only show up later.
  • toms-library
    edited March 16, 2014
    OK, I edited my sqlite file, removing all tags (there were over 15,000 of them - not sure if this is an excessive number?). Doing this completely removed all my delay issues. It opens very fast (~5 seconds for my 6,500 items), and there is no noticeable delay
    switching between collections, etc. Here is specifically what I did:

    1) closed Zotero

    2) I backed up (copied) my zotero.sqlite to a new location (Note: the location of the zotero.sqlite that Zotero uses can be found by pressing the "show data directory" button in the "Files and Folders" tab of the "Advanced" tab of Zotero preferences).

    3) Made a copy of this backup (in case something went wrong)

    4) Edited the backup copy using: http://sourceforge.net/projects/sqlitebrowser/

    To edit using this tool:

    -loaded the copy of the backed-up zotero.sqlite database (File>Open Database)

    -(optional) browsed the data in the "tags" and "itemTags" fields (in the "Browse Data" tab, use the drop down list next to "Table:" to select these fields). This is how I found out how many tags I had

    -selected the "Execute SQL" tab, and pasted the following commands (one at a time) into the "SQL string" box (and pressed "Execute query" for each one separately):
    delete from itemTags
    delete from tags

    -saved this edited zotero.sqlite database (pressed the floppy disc icon)

    -copied this file back to the original location (that Zotero uses).

    It was quite zippy after doing this.

    Hope this helps someone else
  • adamsmith
    as an additional safety check, see if the database passes "check database integrity" from the advanced tab of the Zotero prefs.

    And yes, 15k sounds like a huge amount of tags.

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