Zotero beta constantly freezes in Windows 10 for couple of seconds

pavlo_hrab
Hi,

New Zotero beta installation began to constantly freeze on Windows 10. These freezes are occurring when either annotating a pdf (highlighting or adding comments) or opening tabs from a top menu (such as Help, Preferences, etc).

Report ID: 1645222368

Best,
Pavlo
  • dstillman
    Can you provide a Debug ID (different from a Report ID) for this happening?

    Does it happen if you disable all third-party plugins?
  • pavlo_hrab
    Hi, distillman,

    The problem is solved when I disable Better Bibtex. When the plugin is enabled, though, the issue is reproducible.

    The Debug ID is D687656754. Better bibtex version is 6.1.3. Not sure if the issue should be reported on these forums though (:
  • dstillman
    @emilianoeheyns: This seems to be a fairly common problem when auto-export is enabled, and people blame Zotero. If this is an inherent performance problem, is there anything you can do show feedback (e.g., the bottom-right progress window) if the process is taking more than a (small) fraction of a second?
  • pavlo_hrab
    I am not sure what "...is there anything you can do show feedback..?" part means... Can you please clarify?

    The Zotero basically freezes in pdf reader and I cannot do anything. This is lasting for up to 3-5 seconds, then all the clicks and button pushes will take effect. There are no bottom-right progress window in pdf reader, so I cannot test that (:
  • dstillman
    I’m talking to the BBT developer, not you.
  • emilianoeheyns
    edited January 6, 2022
    @dstillman I already do display a progress bar, albeit my own, at the top where the search field sits. I'd be happy to instead reuse the existing progress bar in the bottom-right. Any pointers on how that's used?

    But more generally, if people have caching and background exports on, which is the default, 10-second delays just should not happen unless you're exporting a large library on a cold cache, which should be a one-time thing, and I encourage people not to export whole libraries (https://retorque.re/zotero-better-bibtex/exporting/auto/).

    If people have background exports off, there isn't really anything I can do I think? Regular exports are synchronous, so I cannot really show progress, as the UI would not update for the duration anyway (right?). If regular exports became async there's a lot more I could do for performance as I could meter out the work piecemeal to the worker.
  • emilianoeheyns
    @pavlo_hrab I'd love to look into your performance problem. If you open an issue on github I can get this started.
  • dstillman
    If people have background exports off, there isn't really anything I can do I think?
    Why are non-background exports even an option? Regular exports in Zotero are a manual action, so the fact that they're synchronous doesn't really matter. They're not run automatically, and nothing that does so should ever freeze the GUI.
  • emilianoeheyns
    edited February 3, 2022
    Because there are places where they don't work for reasons I don't understand. One of them is exporting to a mapped network drive under windows, at least for one user. But the default is background, and you must go into the hidden prefs to turn that off. It is easy to turn back on accidentally, the slider by which you can set the number of workers goes from 1 to 10, so if you touch that slider, it's back on.
  • emilianoeheyns
    @pavlo_hrab but opening tabs from a top menu (such as Help, Preferences, etc) should not cause BBT to awake, if that does stall out Zotero, that's not likely to be BBT.

    I reckon annotations get saved, and saves will trigger auto-exports set up, but unless your library is massive, the cache BBT uses should make those near unnoticable.

    If you have a massive library and you're exporting all of it, on-change auto-export is not the recommended setting. For those instances I'd go with on-idle, or at the very least a long holdoff period (autoExportDelay).
  • XY1989
    I meet the same problem
  • emilianoeheyns
    I cant help you here. Support for BBT happens on github.
  • emilianoeheyns
    I've not seen any reports of this on github. I can't fix problems that I don't get logs for.
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