Desktop Beta crash

Hi all,
I've got a recurrent crash happening with the Zotero desktop beta, 5.0.97-beta.46+4cfa23050 (5.0.97)

I'm on MacOS Big Sur 10.6.

When I opened Zotero this morning, I had an empty library. I followed the steps to locate missing data, and triggered a sync from my online library. That seemed to be working, but Zotero has now "quit unexpectedly" twice.

Hoping for suggestions on how to prevent this crash.

Also, let me know what more information I can provide to help resolve the issue.

Thanks,
Scott
  • What’s the exact macOS version?
  • @smatter: An empty library, though, usually happens when someone accidentally deletes their Zotero data while trying to clear disk space using some external tool.
  • @dstillman - sorry, mistyped the first time. This machine is running MacOS 11.6 (20G165)

    On the empty library, can confirm I cleared disk space over the weekend. I used the built-in tools through About this mac > Storage > Manage.

    Let me know if you want me to copy/paste or otherwise send the problem report. I haven't closed the most recent one yet.
  • Following up to say that I'm still crashing. Hopefully I'm providing useful info here (I've saved two .txt files with copy/pasted problem reports and can share them if it's helpful - I'm not sure those get sent directly to Zotero devs?)

    I've tried periodically over the past couple weeks, with version 5.0.97-beta.46+4cfa23050

    Steps:
    1. Launch Zotero
    2. Sync automatically starts - long stream of Zotfile notifications, a mix of "Zotfile New Attachment" and "Zotfile New Attachment File Renamed".
    3. Crash

    I updated just now to 5.0.97-beta.52+59455ebfa, same result. It seemed to take longer to crash, but eventually did. Tried a third time, same result.

    I'm going to revert to the release version now and see if that helps, then try to switch back to the beta (because I've been enjoyed the pdf reader!)
  • Okay, reverting to the release version wasn't as easy as I had hoped. I ran into the database update issue, and decided not to fiddle around with figuring out how to update from a backup of zotero.sqlite ...

    So, back to trying to sync in the current beta version. I've noticed that while syncing from my library, Zotero is hitting huge %CPU usage (highest I saw was >143%). I've been stopping and restarting syncing, and that seems to be helping me get through more items between crashes.

    It's a bit torturous, but I'm hoping once I get everything synced, the crashes will stop.

    Fwiw, still on MacOS 11.6 (20G165) but will try to update to Monterey on the weekend.
  • I've saved two .txt files with copy/pasted problem reports and can share them if it's helpful - I'm not sure those get sent directly to Zotero devs?
    They don't. You can email to support@zotero.org with a link to this thread.

    But you should try disabling ZotFile.
  • For the crash, let's continue in the other thread, since it's crashing in the same place, and may be related to your display configuration.

    (ZotFile could still be triggering it due to the many progress windows it pops up, so you should still try disabling that, but that's irrelevant to the actual crash, which no plugin should be able to trigger.)
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