Zotero is laggy/slow

Ziza Jaun
edited September 15, 2022
I am on a Dell XPS with an 11th Gen i7 processor and 64gb RAM, but Zotero lags when I do things like add a tag with a shortcut, click on a collection with lots of items in it, or (most importantly) scroll up and down PDF files and highlight sections.

Is this just a function of the number of items in the library (44,000)? Is there a way of speeding it up without deleting stuff?

Other apps are working fine.
  • adomasven
    Could you produce a Debug ID from Zotero for an operation that is slow (like adding a tag, switching collections)?
  • Ziza Jaun
    For selecting my library
    D2128633067

    For tagging
    D1336392073

    Like I say, the biggest problem is lags when scrolling and highlighting PDFs within the app, but I'm not sure the bug reports work for that
  • dstillman
    edited September 17, 2022
    No, they don't.

    Note that you're getting a sync error due to a too-long author name. Before doing anything else, you should fix that to allow syncing to go through and avoid repeated retries.

    If the problem continues after that, does it happen with any PDF or a specific PDF (e.g., one with huge scanned images)? If the former, can you make a screen recording, upload it somewhere (e.g., Dropbox or Google Drive), and provide a link here? If the latter, can you share the PDF, either linked here or emailed to support@zotero.org with a link to this thread?
  • Ziza Jaun
    Thanks. Turns out there are thousands of items with too-long author names. It seems that all the papers from Ovid PsycInfo list all the editor names in one Editor field. Is there a way to batch-remove that field? I've already created a deduplicated collection (using an online tool) of the combined searches for my lit review so I could export the rest to an RIS file as backup and delete the records, but ideally I would keep them in Zotero for easy reference.

    It does it with all PDFs. I notice it is faster - but still not fast - in the morning just after waking up my computer (but without restarting), so maybe it has something to do with system resources. My CPU is on like 10% and RAM 40%, but I'm running three 4k screens off the laptop.
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