Sync won't finish

tsawallis
Ran over my storage limit, so I deleted bunches of snapshots for which I had the PDFs. Since then it syncs fine on my (ancient and decrepit) iMac, but won't finish, and won't finish stopping either, on my (much newer) MBP, plus it radically slows my internet speeds while grinding.

Mouseover the spinning green arrow: "Sync with zotero.org Syncing files in My Library (1 remaining)"

Created folder on the iMac and saved a webpage with snapshot, did the same on the MBP, each showed up on the other correctly as usable files, and that's when the "(1 remaining)" appeared in the mouseover. Number of My Library items match across the two, and incremented correctly with the saved webpages. It looks like the sync works, even though it won't finish.

iMac: mid 2007, OS X El Capitan 10.11.6
MBP: 2019 macOS Mojave 10.14.6
Zotero: 5.0.96.3 on both
Lemme know if more details needed.

I'm hoping for some solution that doesn't involve an overnight download of my entire library from zotero storage, but I'll take what I can get.

Thanks for any help.
  • dstillman
    Can you provide a Debug ID from Zotero startup through a few minutes of syncing, using the "Restart with Logging Enabled" option?
    plus it radically slows my internet speeds while grinding
    This sounds like you might have a large file that's being uploaded. Normal sync activity shouldn't affect other internet traffic.
  • tsawallis
    After 5 mins of green spinner, I get
    "An error occurred sending debug output"

    After 1 more min of green spinner, then 5 minutes after hitting Stop Sync, I get
    Debug ID: D1708817758

    The "large file" hypothesis seems unlikely to me because:
    - I already left it running overnight before I did the...
    - Paired "folder with a website snapshot" exercise, which I suspect would cue after any purported large file sync, plus
    - Until the paired snapshots, there was no "(1 file remaining)" in the green spinner mouseover, which I suspect underlies the large file hypothesis, and then
    - I also suspect a large file transfer should pause correctly instead of jamming up the Stop Sync routines.
  • dstillman
    edited December 7, 2021
    (3)(+0000000): Checked 5502 files in My Library in 9910 ms

    […]

    (3)(+0000005): 1 file to upload for My Library

    […]

    (3)(+0000000): HTTP POST "[…]filename=McI[…].pdf&filesize=144297644"
    It's just a 144 MB file that's being uploaded. If you have slow upload speed to the internet, that might take a while. There's nothing else going on that would affect other internet traffic on your computer.

    There's an Amazon cloud outage today that could've caused intermittent problems. We haven't received any other reports of file upload problems, but it's possible it's affecting this.

    You can check your network traffic in Activity Monitor while the sync is ongoing to see whether data is being uploaded.
  • tsawallis
    FYI:

    Reminder, problem was that Zotero on MBP never finished sync, never finished stopping sync when told to, and radically slowed internet speeds all the while. Debug focused on a large PDF apparently being uploaded. (This was not due to the Amazon cloud outages, because the overnight run attempting to let the sync finish was a couple weeks ago. Took me a while to report the problem.)

    I deleted the file in question, kept the entry. Added a variety of articles and deleted a variety of snapshots alternating between iMac & MBP and syncing between actions. Everything worked fine, but the iMac was very much slower. More precisely, the entries, the PDFs, and the snapshots--or at least their icons--all synced very quickly both ways, but the iMac was much slower to finish off the sync. Puzzling, since the iMac is wired to the router and the MBP uses the wifi. Regardless, everything worked.

    I put the suspect large PDF back in its entry, on the iMac side instead of the MBP side, and hit sync. After 15 mins, sync was done and was already synced to the MBP.

    Deleted the PDF via the iMac side, and it disappeared on the MBP before the iMac green spinner stopped.

    Put the PDF back via the MBP side, sync started automatically and took about 3 seconds. Hit sync on the iMac, the PDF appeared in about 8 sec, and the green spinner stopped after 4 mins.

    In other words, nothing about Zotero's current behavior replicates anything like the sync delays I experienced for the last several weeks. This feels like something as yet undiagnosed, and not just a large file upload, even if everything is working for me for the time being.

    Thought you should know.
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