Hi sorry for the lack of clarification. Initially when I first started using it, I found that the program was progressively running slower and slower as I imported more and more citations. This was about 2 weeks ago. Now this is the same problem that my other team member using Zotero is experiencing. Now, however, the application just doesn't load for me and it has been the case for the past 2 weeks. The spinning wheel sign comes up and even when I let the program run for a few hours its still the same message. When I click on the application in my dock it says that the application is not responding. That message usually appears within a few minutes of opening the program.

Here is the debug ID: D1987776254

So it's certainly taking a long time to load — over two minutes to load the items list — and we'll investigate that, but it shouldn't be freezing permanently.

Was it actually frozen when you stopped it for this output? Before it freezes, are you able to make it to the Sync pane of the preferences and disable auto-syncing? If so, and you then restart again, does that make a difference?

Also, is this in the library root or another collection/search?

Is your trash empty?

If you're able to tell (perhaps after disabling syncing), how many total items are in your library, including child items?

My trash currently has about 30 000 items in it.

Oh, yeah, so that's likely part of the issue. I'm guessing you did a number of repeated imports and kept deleting large numbers of items, and with child items you may actually have a multiple of that figure in total in your database.

So you're kind of in a bad place at the moment, but if you can't disable syncing via the preferences, one option is to open the profile directory and delete prefs.js, and then restart. That will clear your syncing preferences (and your other prefs). Try that and see if that lets Zotero at least start up.

If it does, you're going to need to delete items in the trash in smaller batches. Depending on the specifics of your imports, you may also have lots of mostly unnecessary child notes on your items.

Alternatively, if you're happy with the state of all of your libraries on zotero.org (or want to try a single import again), you can simply close Zotero and delete zotero.sqlite from the Zotero data directory. It will then pull down all your data from the server.

Hi Dan,
Zotero finally opened up for me this morning. I went into preferences and disabled auto-sync and unchecked the boxes which allowed for pdfs to be attached to each citation. I then decided to empty my trash (all 30 000+ items). It has been over 2 and a half hours and the loading sign is still coming up. Should it be taking this long to clear the trash in Zotero? It's making my entire laptop super slow to the point where I gave up trying to open other word docs or internet pages.

Hi Dan, how do I go about emptying the trash in bits as opposed to all at once?