Zotero Hangs for 1-2 Minutes
Hi,
I had problems with my Zotero for a while, since the free storage is only 300MB and my references are both on my personal PC and work PC. As you can guess, whenever I add a reference to my library from my work PC, files are stored locally and sync cannot upload them due to the limited storage. Therefore, I have recently moved my Zotero library ("zotero" directory in profile directory) on a samba network location to access it from both Zotero installations (personal and work).
(Maybe irrelevant: I also imported entries from my personal computer, after which I had duplicates for every reference. Then I removed the ones, which did not have the attached files. These are the ones synced without files due to the storage limitations.)
Right now, Zotero on my work PC is accessing this network location alone (I still did not connect my persona Zotero installation to this).
The main issue is that Zotero hangs once in a while for a couple of minutes, which is extremely annoying. The network location is on university servers, connected with a very fast connection and I never had any performance issue. I examined what Zotero is doing during this with Process Explorer in Windows 7 and apparently Zotero is reading directories (with attachment files) one after the another:
e.g.
...\zotero\storage\FDXAPB6Q
...\zotero\storage\12OPKR7E
...\zotero\storage\F4XZUB3U
Only think I was doing as user, was simply click around in Zotero (switching between collections and clicking in one or two references) or open a single PDF file. There is no reason why Zotero is accessing many of these directories, which seems to be the cause of freezing. I think there is a performance issue and Zotero could have worked more efficiently with file access. Interestingly, I do not observe the hanging if the directory is accessed locally. But also I do not see that Zotero accesses above-mentioned directories in Process Explorer.
I can provide more and detailed explanation of the observation. Please don't hesitate to ask, if you have any questions.
Thanks in advance!
I had problems with my Zotero for a while, since the free storage is only 300MB and my references are both on my personal PC and work PC. As you can guess, whenever I add a reference to my library from my work PC, files are stored locally and sync cannot upload them due to the limited storage. Therefore, I have recently moved my Zotero library ("zotero" directory in profile directory) on a samba network location to access it from both Zotero installations (personal and work).
(Maybe irrelevant: I also imported entries from my personal computer, after which I had duplicates for every reference. Then I removed the ones, which did not have the attached files. These are the ones synced without files due to the storage limitations.)
Right now, Zotero on my work PC is accessing this network location alone (I still did not connect my persona Zotero installation to this).
The main issue is that Zotero hangs once in a while for a couple of minutes, which is extremely annoying. The network location is on university servers, connected with a very fast connection and I never had any performance issue. I examined what Zotero is doing during this with Process Explorer in Windows 7 and apparently Zotero is reading directories (with attachment files) one after the another:
e.g.
...\zotero\storage\FDXAPB6Q
...\zotero\storage\12OPKR7E
...\zotero\storage\F4XZUB3U
Only think I was doing as user, was simply click around in Zotero (switching between collections and clicking in one or two references) or open a single PDF file. There is no reason why Zotero is accessing many of these directories, which seems to be the cause of freezing. I think there is a performance issue and Zotero could have worked more efficiently with file access. Interestingly, I do not observe the hanging if the directory is accessed locally. But also I do not see that Zotero accesses above-mentioned directories in Process Explorer.
I can provide more and detailed explanation of the observation. Please don't hesitate to ask, if you have any questions.
Thanks in advance!
My best guess on why Zotero is checking directories would be to display the attachment status (the blue dot in the attachment column). That usually wouldn't take any significant amount of time, but apparently does given your set-up.