[Word for Mac 16] Zotero 5.0.44 stalls, freezes or does nothing on refresh of a large document

fschwarzwaelder
edited April 9, 2018
Hi, I'm using Zotero with Word for Mac 16, but the same issue is happening with Word for Mac 2011.

I've got a large word document (400+ pages) with many Zotero citations in it. This document has been combined from multiple single documents, which were working fine with Zotero. The large single one is where the trouble starts.

I now can add new citations without problems, they are then displayed underlined in accordance to the new delayed refresh feature. But I can't refresh them anymore. Hitting refresh does seemingly nothing. I don't know whether Zotero is doing anything in the background, whether it's doing nothing or has stalled, because there is no visualisation. Letting it sit for 30 minutes changes nothing.

What I do know: After I have tried to refresh, I can't use the Zotero word plugin at all anymore. Document preferences won't open, neither will the citation picker. I need to force quit and restart Zotero to be able to work with citations again, with every refresh again stalling the document.

What can I do?
  • adamsmith
    While this shouldn't take so long, can you try giving Zotero more time to refresh, e.g. by letting it run over night after refreshing? The first refresh after the introduction of the new feature does take longer than usually.
  • fschwarzwaelder
    Thanks, I'll give that a go. In the meantime, is there any way to tell if Zotero is actually doing something or if I'm just running a stalled program over night?
  • adamsmith
    you should be seeing fluctuating CPU & memory usage in the activity monitor
  • dstillman
    @fschwarzwaelder: You can also use Help → Debug Output Logging → View Output to see if it's doing anything (though leaving that open might slow things down a bit).
  • fschwarzwaelder
    So, letting it run over night gives the following error:
    The operation couldn't be completed. (OSStatus error -1712.) @[displayAlert:document.m:186]
  • adomasven
    If you haven't restarted Zotero yet, could you submit a Report ID?
  • fschwarzwaelder
    Well no, I restarted it in the morning. I could do the whole thing once more over night, of course.

    In the meantime, I'm very worried about the scale of this issue at this late stage of my project. Completing the steps for debugging broken documents alone would take me days at the rate Zotero is operating now. Reverting all citations to manual would also be a huge amount of work, obviously. Are there general scaling issues I should have known about or is this something I can reasonably expect to fix?
  • adomasven
    There have always been scaling issues, although we never had users report that even a few hundred citations take more than a couple of hours to refresh. Word 2016 introduced some additional instability to the Mac Word suite, which might exacerbate the issue both in terms of speed and failures to display dialogs.

    You should enable debug logging, attempt a refresh with Word 2011 for this document and see whether it works and if it does not, submit the debug output. Make sure that a Zotero library sync is not running during this time, since syncing logs a lot of information.
  • fbennett
    A anecdotal data point on the speed issue.

    A colleague who works on a Mac with thesis-length documents recently mentioned that when he set up Parallels and installed Windows 10 on the Mac, the performance of Word + Zotero in the virtual Windows environment was night and day for speed compared to the native Mac builds. He described the speed advantage as an order of magnitude difference.
  • adomasven
    @fbennett I can confirm that Windows+Word in a VM on a Mac is faster for me than Mac Word integration. It is indeed bizarre, but we haven't investigated the reasons for this, which is likely due to API differences for WinWord vs MacWord integration with Zotero.

    @fschwarzwaelder this is something that you could give a try as a last-resort option, if you can get hold of a Windows PC.
  • fschwarzwaelder
    edited April 12, 2018
    So, I let it run again over night and it ran into the same error. This time I made the error report, Report ID: 1195300399

    I'll try Windows next, see if that can at least speed things up.
  • adomasven
    Does the document appear updated (e.g. is bibliography present, or does it display a notice for delayed citing mode)? If you create a new document, insert a citation, then modify its text and try to edit it with Zotero, does the prompt for modified citation display correctly, or do you get The operation couldn't be completed. (OSStatus error -1712.) @[displayAlert:document.m:186] too?
  • fschwarzwaelder
    It does appear to be updated in the places I looked, although I can't be sure if that goes for the entire document.

    In a new document, the prompt displays correctly.
  • adomasven
    For the update that you ran overnight, did you use Word 2016 or Word 2011?
  • fschwarzwaelder
    I used Word 2011 for that.
  • adomasven
    Sorry for the trouble. If you are using the delayed citing mode and after refresh you see your bibliography displayed (instead of the placeholder telling you that bibliography needs to be updated via a refresh), then it means that Zotero managed to update your document successfully (since bibliography is updated last). I am not sure what this dialog that Zotero is failing to display is.

    Do report if you embark on either debugging the document in pieces or if editing/updating on Windows works better. A Debug ID for a refresh would likely also give more insight into what the problem is.
  • fschwarzwaelder
    I finally got around to letting Windows 10/Word 16 inside Virtualbox have a go at it. It's a huge performance increase and it seems to have finished in way under an hour. Thanks a lot for this tip! Of course it's not ideal to have to switch OS, but having this work just any way at all is already a huge relief. This is definitely the way to go for anyone struggling with Zotero in Word for Mac.

    I'll soon take the document Windows produced and take it back to MacOS, see if the refresh "fixed" any of the performance issues. I'll report back on that. Thanks again.
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