I would recommend clearing your Full-Text Cache once in order to reduce the size of your Zotero database. In the Search preferences, press the "Clear Index…" button, then select "Clear All Except Web Links", since those can't be rebuilt. This could take some time to finish, so do it overnight. You might be able to decrease the size of your zotero.sqlite file roughly by a factor of ten. Of course, this will depend on the amount of notes, etc., in your database. Just in case, remember to back up your Zotero data.

Going forward, you could rebuild the index with a reduced number of characters and pages per file. An alternative would be to rely on external search tools for full-text searches. If you want to disable full-text indexing, set the value for "Maximum characters to index per file" to 0. The most relevant data might already be available in the abstracts, notes, tags, etc., which will remain in your Zotero database if you delete the full-text index.

(To be clear, 2.7 GB is obviously very large, and the full-text index is likely the main contributor to that size, but we need to rule out other problems first. A delay when right-clicking isn't normal and shouldn't be in any way related to the full-text index. Databases are designed to remain fast even when large, as long as they're indexed properly.)

Hi both,

thanks!

@dstillman - there are two types of issues, depending on whether a sync is going on or not.

(1) With sync, the right-click takes time. I also get the selected item changing erratically. E.g., I click on an item in a collection, but then the selection jumps back to the first item in that collection.

(2) With no sync going on, the right-click is fairly responsive. However, selecting a library or a collection takes a few secs to load. Also, searching is very slow.

I'll try turning the plugins off and see what happens.

Hi all,

To give some more feedback on this. I have disabled full-text indexing, and disabled all plugins, but was still getting the two issues above (1 and 2). My db is 2.9 GB. As Dan said above, that in itself should not slow down the right-click, but somehow it does (as described above).

In Ubuntu, I can start zotero with the profile manager (/opt/zotero/zotero --ProfileManager) and then set up a new profile. I've done this for a set of libraries I use daily. I first included one library (~ 3000 items, sqlite size ~ 40MB) and the performance is super-fast/instant.

I've then included a few more libraries (~ 10,000 items, ~ 130MB), the performance is still very fast, but interestingly it's slower than with just one library. There's no problem at all - it's very fast. However, I wouldn't have expected the performance difference to be noticeable. One thing that happens with this larger db size is that the search is 'two stepped': There's an initial delay, then one set appears, that then flips into a second set. With the smaller db, there was only a minimal/unnoticable delay, then the set of results would just appear.

So I have been working with a 20k+ entries library which has been painfully slow and very annoying to work with. After finding this thread I've cleared my index and updated the indexing settings and it suddenly only takes me a few seconds to add or edit citations rather than over a minute. Thanks for sharing your experiences @qqbb, this is very helpful, I sure hope no one removes these settings!