Zotero abruptly slow

cconnol12
Hello
Abruptly 2 days ago Zotero started running very slow. It is almost a night and day change. I disabled automatic updates and this did not help. It is taking several minutes to put a citation in a paragraph with only 500 words and when working on current documents I have had to wait for over 10 minutes and usually I just give up and force the application to quit so I can move on.

Below is the debugging ID. Any help you can provide would be greatly appreciated. Prior to the last 2 days my citations would update in only a few seconds

D1079316422
  • adomasven
    Have you tried restarting your computer? Do you have any other processes running in the background that could be using a lot of resources? Are other applications fast?
  • edmundrussell
    I have the same problem. I am using Zotero on a MacBook Pro. I have been using Zotero for years, and during that time it would insert a citation quickly (within a few seconds). It would refresh within a minute or so. Starting about a month ago, it suddenly became very slow to insert citations (many seconds) and to refresh (many minutes, even in a document of a few hundred words). Turning off automatic update helped some, but there is still a dramatic slowdown. The slowdown occurred roughly around the time I updated MS Word to 16.77.1 and operating system to Sonoma 14.0. There is a long delay, with nothing visible happening, after clicking to insert citation or refresh. Thinking Zotero did not register a click to insert citation or refresh, I clicked each a second time, and the second click caused MS Word to freeze, forcing a Force Quit. During the Force Quit process, I got an error message saying to contact the Zotero developer to inform them a macro was causing Word to hang. I have restarted the computer, and closed other applications, but have the same slowdown. Other applications seems to work at about the same speed as before, so the slowdown, so far as I can tell, seems unique to Zotero.
  • adomasven
    @edmundrussell Can you reproduce this consistently? If so, could you do some testing for us?

    1. With Zotero and Word running open Activity Monitor.app, switch to the CPU tab, right-click on the columns and add the App Nap column
    2. Find Zotero in the list, and select it, then make sure you see the App Nap column (you might need to enlarge the window or scroll to the right).
    3. Go into Word and attempt to use the Zotero plugin. Do not press the plugin buttons multiple times, or switch to the Zotero application, instead switch to the Activity Monitor and see if under Zotero in column App Nap it says "Yes".
  • dstillman
    edited October 11, 2023
    @edmundrussell: An easier test would just be to make sure you're keeping some part of the Zotero window visible — macOS won't put visible apps into App Nap. Can you reproduce this slowness if you keep Zotero visible at all times?

    And then to test with App Nap enabled, you can hide Zotero with Cmd-H, wait a bit (30 seconds, a minute) until you see "Yes" for App Nap for Zotero in Activity Monitor, and then try.
  • dstillman
    @edmundrussell: Also, could you provide a Debug ID for this, and @cconnol12, if you're still around, could you provide another? We'd like to compare the timings to see if there's some consistent delay.
  • edmundrussell
    Before seeing your reply, I read elsewhere that closing the tag window sped up Zotero. I tried that, and it worked. Response was faster. I tried opening the tag window to see if it slowed things down again, and it did, but not consistently.

    Per your request, I hid Zotero, waited for App Nap to show yes, then inserted citation with tag window open, and it was slow. Tried again with tag window closed, and was still slow. Then did debug. ID is D629550824. The performance was roughly normal while running the debug process. Realized I did not wait for App Nap to turn to yes, so redid the debug process while waiting for AppNap to turn to yes first. Here is ID: D825679233. This time it was slow to enable me to insert the citation (meaning the Add/Edit Citation window was slow to appear). Tag window was closed during the debug runs.

    Thanks for your help.
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