MacWord and large documents is terribly slow even when Zotero isn't used. Word for Windows with Zotero works great on a Mac that has Boot Camp or an emulator such as Parallels. Word for Windows on an Intel Mac is quite fast (even with a large Zotero document with many citations).

First, you're going to need to drop the attitude or you're going to be banned from posting here. If you're having a problem, just report it politely like every other person who posts here and we'll do our best to help. Don't come here and tell us we haven't tested or optimized our own software.

As I say, if it's a large document, you should disable automatic citation updates.

If it's still slow with citation updates disabled on Windows, that would be very unusual in a document of that size, and we'd want a Debug ID for an operation that was slow.

I didn't say you didn't optimize or test

You: "Please test your product"

shifting the blame on to other makers of software is not polite either

It has nothing to do with politeness — it's explaining where the problem lies so that people have realistic expectations and they don't, say, think we can fix something that we can't fix. Again, if you think we're wrong, you're welcome to dig into the code and identify a way to improve it. Otherwise, as a seasoned developer you surely know it's obnoxious to come into an open-source project and assert without any evidence that there's a better way to do something.

@dannyil As the primary dev of the word processor extensions I'd like you to know (or rather to reiterate the point, and if you read other forum threads on this issue you would have seen me say it) that I have personally spent countless hours that over the last 5 years would probably amount to weeks of dev time profiling (as well as time off-work cycling, in the shower, commuting, etc. thinking about) the Word for Mac integration specifically to improve its performance and stability. It was bad around 2016-2018. Then we basically received no complaints between 2019 and 2020 about performance, this was without any specific improvements on our end over that time, and then at the end of 2020 we started seeing the issue come up a lot again. The performance of the APIs which we use to interface with Word are a function of Apple's AppleEvent performance and the implementation of AppleEvent handlers on Microsoft's end. And given the drastic variation of the integration speed based on no changes on our end over the past years we have to at least point out that this isn't just within our hands and that it can be fast with the code that we have, if Apple and Microsoft cared to make it so. There are no low-hanging apples or even medium difficulty ideas that we have not tried for how to improve the speed in a meaningful way. On the other hand, we have promises from Microsoft to add functionality to their JS plugin API, which will allow us to port our plugin and hopefully drastically improve the performance on macOS (as well as allow to support integration on Word Online, Word for iOS and others). The other word processor integrations are also receiving the necessary attention although none of them, not even Google Docs are quite as slow as Mac Word. I do routinely test the integrations with documents that contain hundreds of pages and citations which often push the limits of the word processors themselves. And we certainly cannot be faster than the Word processors themselves.

I'm sure you didn't know at least some of what I wrote above, but most seasoned Zotero forums community members as well as the internal team are well aware of the situation. So yes, your initial post is arrogant in light of the above and the correct answer to it is indeed "Great, please submit a patch". As someone who has agonized over this a countless number of hours I'd be the first one to applaud and merge it.

@adomasven I have noticed that searching in the Word add-on is becoming slower. My database has ~2500 papers, now when I add/edit a citation it takes about 2-4 seconds to get the results, it was almost instantaneous a few months ago and my database hasn't grown much. I have an i7 9th gen, plenty of ram, SSD, Win 10, Word 2019. What could cause this delay? Is it possible to use an indexing such as Search Everything?