Standalone is slow handling big drag-and-drops to folders

ciara.healy
I am working with a truly large number of citations (thousands) and am using Zotero to organize them and de-dupe them before they go into a spreadsheet.

I am finding that the Standalone is really balky/slow/unresponsive with regard to both importing large .ris files AND when trying to move a large selection of items into and across folders. Sometimes Zotero can't even.

It is taking FOREVER.

Any suggestions for changing settings/preferences anything to make it go more quickly?
  • ciara.healy
    Check it out - http://screencast.com/t/SuHo83kk

    I am trying to move almost 500 citations (at once) from one folder to another. It did not work. And it took a long time for it to not work.
  • dstillman
    Can you explain what you mean by "did not work"? From the video, it looks like it's freezing for a while, but it is ultimately adding the items to the new collection.

    How many total items (including child items) do you have in your database?

    Also, can you provide a Debug ID for an action that's slow?
  • ciara.healy
    Dan,
    There were no new items added to either the folder "empty" or the folder Medical. It does look like it works. But it doesn't. It freezes for a while when I choose items, it freezes for a while when i drag them and it freezes when they are supposedly going into another folder (even though they don't make it into the folder.)

    I have about 30,000 items in the database now. Most of which (about 28k)were added in the last three weeks. Associated with those recent citations are 5 standalone notes, and no .pdfs or screenshots. They are all just citations. Also, I have not attempted to synch.

    I am ultimately exporting them to Excel and am using Zotero exclusively now to de-dupe and organize the citations into folders prior to export.

    C
  • dstillman
    I don't understand — at 2:00, isn't "empty" selected with the items you just dragged?

    Still need a Debug ID.
  • ciara.healy
    Thanks, Dan -
    It is not the case that there are no items in the folder. It is the case that the items I tried to put into the folder in the Jing example did not go into the folder. It worked once, which is why it has items in it, but now it doesn't. Actually, I made the "empty" folder *because* the parent folder "medical" stopped receiving my drag-n-drops and I thought putting a subfolder might help. It kind of did. But not really. And not even after freezing up for a while. It just doesn't work now. Also, it is currently taking be forever to do my de-duping.

    Yes please re: Debug ID. Along with directions for how to work with the Debug ID once I have it. This is the first-ever problem I have had with Zotero ever.
    C
  • aurimas
    https://www.zotero.org/support/debug_output for debug log. Try generating that with as few items as possible (that still result in the issue).

    Can you reproduce this with an empty collection?
  • ciara.healy
    OMG!
    I was wrong. There are thousands of notes and they all start with: "The following values have no corresponding Zotero field:
    issue"

    ugh.
  • aurimas
    In case you haven't seen this, read through https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/importing_records_from_endnote#importing_into_zotero which talks about disabling those notes prior to import and how to delete the notes quickly after the import.
  • ciara.healy
    The Debug ID is D165491825.
  • ciara.healy
    aurimas,
    the _RIS import tag is working for the notes but also selecting items that are NOT notes. It is not really working - some of the items (citations) are being selected as well.
  • dstillman
    edited May 22, 2015
    It is the case that the items I tried to put into the folder in the Jing example did not go into the folder. It worked once, which is why it has items in it, but now it doesn't.
    Can you be more specific? Are you expecting Zotero to duplicate the items you're dragging? Because that's not how collections in Zotero work. They're all the same items, and they can be added, once, to different collections.

    If you look at :26 in the video, "MEDLINE 100 to 199" is selected with the end of the items list shown, and then when you look at 2:10, "empty" is select with the exact same items shown. So what isn't there?
  • dstillman
    the _RIS import tag is working for the notes but also selecting items that are NOT notes
    No it's not. It's expanding the parent items of child items that have that tag. You'll note that the parent items and attachments are gray, meaning that they're context rows that don't match the search.
  • aurimas
    I don't think we've ever seen that. The items will appear in the center but will be in gray, only the notes will be shown in black. You can then click on one of the notes and press Ctrl/Cmd+A.
  • ciara.healy
    It worked - i forgot the ctrl-A
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