Upgrade StorageOptimize performance for large libraries
I love Zotero, but now that I have about 10,000 items in my library (most with a single PDF attachment of the article in question) it's becoming difficult to use. The program seems to simply not be built to handle so many items in a library, and the performance is very poor, with regular waits of a minute or so.
I know a few other people that have had similar issues and have actually switched products because of this.
Anyway, I know there is probably a lot behind fixing something like this, but I really hope that optimizing the speed for large libraries can be done. I know it's possible because there are a few pay products that don't have problems with large libraries, but I would love to continue using Zotero and hope this is possible. Thanks!
I know a few other people that have had similar issues and have actually switched products because of this.
Anyway, I know there is probably a lot behind fixing something like this, but I really hope that optimizing the speed for large libraries can be done. I know it's possible because there are a few pay products that don't have problems with large libraries, but I would love to continue using Zotero and hope this is possible. Thanks!
I actually just switched to a new Core i7, also with 8GB and an SSD, and have only just now, after posting the above message, tested the performance of Zotero with the new computer. I find the performance very good, with the maximum wait I have experienced to be only a few seconds. So, anyway, I still would love to see performance improvements, but at least with a high powered computer the performance is quite good.
https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/item_count
Zotero should handle 10k total without issue, but I can see it running slower with 20k+ on a slow computer.
Also a question which actions take a long time: Opening up Zotero for the first time is generally one of the slowest actions. The other thing that takes long are full text searches--you can either limit searches to creator-title-year or, at least, begin the search with a double quote (") so that it only triggers when you hit return.
You can also, if full text search isn't important to you, limit the amount of indexing you do.
On the Zotero side, performance improvements are always on the menu, plus it benefits from any performance improvements passed down from mozilla.
Where I mostly noticed performance problems was when selecting the My Library view or when running searches. Also when filtering by tags. It could regularly take 15 seconds or a little longer maybe often, and at times I remember 30-60 seconds waits.
As mentioned, with my recent computer upgrade it is all working fine, with maximum waits of 3 seconds. But with the Core i3 laptop it was a problem.