very very long access time

Hello
I am a long term user of Zotero. But I am more and more disapointed with the time needed to open the zotero pane and to download and grab the references, be it from the web or from academic journals publishers, with PDF.
It is not unusual that it takes two three minutes to open, with firefox (latest version) running without respondind anymore.
Can it be related with the fact that my zotero database is now over Go? It is becoming so unproductive that I am wondering if i have to try google chrome, or the standalone version. But since my my objective is to grab newpapers and blog articles I think I definitively need to work with a browser.
Here is a error report about the last process of opening and grabing a reference: 1967991168
  • Can you provide a Debug ID for an operation that's slow? Also, make sure you've tried with your other Zotero-related extensions disabled.
  • Here is a debug report 18985204 (I just tried to open a collection: it took 30 " turing endlessly)
    Do you sugest to uninstall ZotFile and Zutillo? there are very useful for managing the data and attachments.
  • 1) That's a Report ID, not a Debug ID.

    2) No, I'm saying to disable them temporarily to see if the problem still happens without them. They should be disabled when you generate the Debug ID.
  • Hello Dan
    here is my debud report : D1031259896
    While saving a reference from the web, it took about 30", firefox turned without being reachable, etc.
    I have desactivated Zotfile, Zutilo, word plugin and locale switcher (which I never use I think i will supress it)
  • Here is another report after saving another page from the web : it took once again almost 1 mn: D1007499742
  • What about if you set "Max characters to index per page" to 1 in the Search pane of the Zotero preferences?

    Also, what are your index stats at the bottom of that pane?
  • Stats:
    Indexed 7020
    Partially 51
    non indexed: 1810
    word: 374556
    (I don't know if these stats are impressive. The computer has restarted this night and I just copied them after opening the computer and having waited for about 50" when opening zotero)
  • Did you try the settings change I suggested?
  • (Note that the settings change shouldn't affect startup times, only save times. It's just to see if full-text indexing is the issue with saving.)
  • well, it did better for two short newspaper and blog articles. But not an academic journal article with a PDF...
  • Yeah, for PDFs the change would be setting the max pages setting to 0. (Those settings are a little inconsistent right now. Setting to 0 should really disable, but I think that only works for the pages setting — you have to use 1 for max characters.)

    Anyhow, this suggests that it's full-text indexing that's slowing down your saves. How recent is this computer? Is your Zotero data directory in its default location on your local hard drive, or have you moved it elsewhere (network share, Dropbox, etc.)?
  • Not sure if it will help, but one thing you could try is running your database through the DB Repair Tool, which has the side effect of rebuilding your database, which can in some cases improve performance a bit.

    (We're planning to do more automated DB optimization in the future, and we're also going to be overhauling full-text indexing to handle large indexes better, but this might be of more immediate help.)
  • Thanks Dan.
    Zotero is in the default location, on my hard drive.
    Do you advise to stop indexing the PDF if I understand. What will be the consequence? Zotero will be searchable only by author, date, title and tags? not the content?
    Thank you for DB Repair Tool. I think I have to find free time to perform it, may be vacation!? for 18 Go...
  • No, the total size of your data directory is irrelevant for the repair tool. You just need to upload your zotero.sqlite file. (That might be too big to upload if you have a large full-text index, but it's certainly not 18GB.)

    I wasn't recommending disabling full-text indexing, just suggesting it as a debugging step. But yes, if you disable full-text indexing, you'll be able to search by what you see within the Zotero interface but not by the content of attachments.
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