"Add items by DOI" timeout?

bjorn.paulson
Recently the "Add items by DOI" magic want has started becoming very slow: 10~20s lookup times for successful DOIs, with a fraction of DOIs timing out after 20s to two minutes: "Lookup failed: Zotero could not find a record for the specified identifier. Please verify the identifier and try again."

Lookup failures have happened before, but it has never been more than one in one hundred DOIs. Now it seems that it is happening to one in four. How can I troubleshoot this?

Zotero 5.0.92 on Windows 7.
  • DWL-SDCA
    edited October 29, 2020
    Please provide examples of the failed DOIs. Some "DOIs" are not reachable through the registries Zotero can access. Some publishers include imaginary DOIs to make their articles seem more legitimate. A 2 minute wait seems really long. I wand about 100 DOIs every day and I've never had a wait of more than 10-12 seconds (usually far less than that).
  • dstillman
    edited October 28, 2020
    @bjorn.paulson: We'd want to see a Debug ID for an attempt that's slow or that fails.
  • bjorn.paulson
    @DWL-SDCA The issue seems to have resolved itself after rebooting and changing networks. I'm guessing either my computer was low on RAM or there were problems with the corporate network. Added ~130 DOIs and only needed to repeat one.

    The problem was not with the existence of the DOIs, because after retrying enough they would succeed.

    @dstillman Thanks! The problem seems to have resolved itself, but each session now I'm recording debugging data before each lookup, in case it happens again.
  • dstillman
    I believe Crossref's lookup service was having trouble a few days ago, so I'd guess it was that.
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