problem syncing

c bille
HI,
zotero is not correctly syncing on one of my computers.
The green arrow spins indefintly. Their is no pregress bar. Their is no error message. Uploading or downlowding are erratic. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. It hasn't sync for 6 days now.
Can somebody help me?
Here is the debug ID D1748960544.
  • dstillman
    Should be fixed. (Simply restarting Zotero likely would have done the trick as well.)
  • JoshCraig
    Hi Dan

    I work at an organisation where we all use Zotero Standalone for Windows v4.016 with Chrome connector and a number of people have had intermittent syncing issues like the one described above.

    When you say it 'should be fixed' now, do you mean in the latest version of Zotero?

    Josh
  • adamsmith
    @Josh - you should definitely all update to 4.0.19, which has many bugfixes and improvements, but in the case above Dan likely just advanced a stalled sync or so, so that's not related to the new version.

    Large syncs will occasionally time out due to the way they work and the behavior of Amazon's cloud, best guess is that's what you're seeing. The next major version of Zotero will handle that more elegantly, but that's still a bit away.
  • JoshCraig
    OK good to know. My IT department tells me we're generally slow to update because Zotero doesn't have particularly good support for pushing out updates en masse. Is that right?

    The sync issue is frustrating because I have never had a problem personally, but for other users with identical software they sync and the progress bar never moves. So yeah, it would definitely be good to get fixed.
  • JoshCraig
    Just to be clear, is that what a timeout looks like? The sync icon continues to turn and the progress bar doesn't update?

    Because it's not a case of getting the red exclamation mark icon - that never occurs.
  • adamsmith
    edited April 9, 2014
    note that as soon as you have a progress bar, the data sync is done - the delay/stalled progress bar is only for file sync. edit: and that's exactly how a timeout would look, yes.
    Zotero doesn't have particularly good support for pushing out updates en masse. Is that right?
    not sure what they mean exactly, but if users can't update Zotero themselves it's certainly possible that this requires some manual labor on the IT dept's part.
  • JoshCraig
    Yeah we can't updates ourselves so manual labour is the issue I think.
  • JoshCraig
    So for now the answer is be patient and try syncing again later?
  • JoshCraig
    edited April 9, 2014
    Maybe the issue could be caused by a very large file attachment somewhere? If so, is there any way for me to sort my Zotero library by attachment size to identify it?

    edit: The whole library is only 90MB so maybe that's not the problem.
  • adamsmith
    So for now the answer is be patient and try syncing again later?
    yes. And as I say - your sync has gone through at that point, this only affects attachments.
  • JoshCraig
    OK thanks for your help.
  • dstillman
    edited April 9, 2014
    Intermittent file sync timeouts from Amazon (which, as adamsmith said, are totally separate from the original data sync issue in this thread) caused a stall in versions before 4.0.19 that required restarting Zotero. In 4.0.19 it results in a proper sync error, which can just be ignored, and you can just restart the sync (or leave it on auto-sync and let it sync on its own as you make changes). You can hover over the progress bar to see how much progress it's making each time.

    As adamsmith said, future versions will just retry automatically after the timeouts.
  • JoshCraig
    OK so if we upgrade to 4.0.19 and the error happens again the answer is to ignore it and then try syncing again?
  • dstillman
    Yes.
  • JoshCraig
    OK great I guess we'll give that a go and let you know if we have any more errors.
  • JoshCraig
    Just for your info, I just spoke to someone who had this issue and although they didn't try restarting Zotero they did shut down their computer, come back the next day and still have the same problem.
  • dstillman
    edited April 9, 2014
    It's not a problem that would go away on its own. It's just an intermittent timeout from Amazon's file storage service. It's not within our control, and even people at Amazon don't seem to really know why it happens.* The only thing we can do is retry transfers that fail, which we'll do in the next major version of Zotero. In the meantime, you can just ignore it and let it auto-sync and/or click the sync button to restart the sync when it occurs.


    * They have actual documentation that says the following:
    Custom S3 exponential backoff checking use to retry 400 responses containing the following reason phrase: "Your socket connection to the server was not read from or written to within the timeout period.". This error has been reported as intermittent/random, and in most cases, seems to occur during the middle of a transfer. This plugin will attempt to retry these failed requests…
  • JoshCraig
    OK no problem I understand. From my perspective it's just an issue because when people ignore it they then add references which other people had already added to a library. Then we end up with a reference list with duplicates which can be a pain to fix.
  • dstillman
    No, this is a file sync error, so it doesn't affect data syncing. All data syncs before files sync. The only issue is that you're using an outdated version of Zotero in which this timeout caused a stall, which would in fact prevent further data syncs from occurring until manual action was taken (either restarting Zotero or maybe manually stopping the sync). In 4.0.19, the sync would just fail on its own and auto-syncs would continue to happen.
  • JoshCraig
    OK I get it now. I think some people might have been leaving Zotero going for days hoping to eventually see some movement on their progress bar when actually that is the worst thing they could have done. Good to know.
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