It's taking a huge ammount of time to load my library in Zotero after updateing to 8. I disabled sync, but even so it's slow as duck.
What should I do?
Why do you release a new version with such a basic bug?

It took a while but loaded at the first time. But I turned off the computer and now it does'nt load.

Now it's stuck on "Loading items…"

debug id 502749512

[unrelated errors removed — D.S.]

appName => Zotero, version => 8.0 (x64), os => Windows 11 26200, locale => pt-BR, extensions =>

https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u6930935/fignlwq8lw0zr86f4umv.png

in debug options

1 item in Minha biblioteca

(4)(+0000002): SELECT itemID, name, type FROM items LEFT JOIN itemTags USING (itemID) LEFT JOIN tags USING (tagID) WHERE libraryID=? AND itemID IN (48408) [1]

(3)(+0000002): Loaded tags in Minha biblioteca in 5 ms

(3)(+0000002): Loading creators for 1 item in Minha biblioteca

(4)(+0000001): SELECT itemID, creatorID, creatorTypeID, orderIndex FROM items LEFT JOIN itemCreators USING (itemID) WHERE libraryID=? AND itemID IN (68256) ORDER BY itemID, orderIndex [1]

(3)(+0000002): Loaded creators in Minha biblioteca in 3 ms

(3)(+0000003): Loading annotation for 1 item in Minha biblioteca

(4)(+0000003): SELECT itemID, IA.parentItemID, IA.type, IA.authorName, IA.text, IA.comment, IA.color, IA.sortIndex, IA.isExternal FROM items JOIN itemAnnotations IA USING (itemID) WHERE libraryID=? AND itemID IN (68256) [1]

(3)(+0000004): Loaded annotation in Minha biblioteca in 7 ms

Are you unable to submit a debug ID or why aren't you?

Yes, but you should do it again and let it go for several minutes of it showing "Loading items…" before submitting.

That's the same thing.

No, that's fine.

OK, we're looking into this. Is this on a hard disk or an SSD?

Can you try the latest Zotero beta and see how long that takes?

This is likely mostly a result of having a huge number of annotations in the database. There's more we need to fix, but there's a change in the beta that might speed things up a bit.

The current beta is literally Zotero 8 plus a few bug fixes from the last few days. It’s perfectly safe — we wouldn’t ask you to try it if it weren’t. And you can also always make a backup of your Zotero database before trying it if you’re concerned.

Zotero 8 was in public beta for over a year. If we had received other reports like yours, we would’ve investigated. We test with large databases, but we can’t predict the exact structure of everyone’s library or how they’ll perform on every computer.

You reported this yesterday, and we already have a partial fix for you to try, so we’re obviously taking this seriously, but you’ll need to work with us if you’d like to ensure that your issue gets fixed quickly. Or you can reinstall Zotero 7 from the download page for now, but then it may take a bit longer before we can be sure we have a fix for you.

@fatpaw: Thanks. Yes, it looks like this is specifically happening for databases with tens of thousands of annotations.

We'll have another beta to try with additional optimizations within the next couple days.

Very obviously nobody is claiming this is a feature.

A library with 24k3 items that all need extra migration consistently starts in 40 - 42 seconds for me. Extra migration is about 2/3s of the startup time.

I know, but for me the upper bound for loading a library with 24k3 items is 40 seconds. I don't have precise timing of just the load phase without extra migration but manual timing puts it at 10-18s.

@dstillman: I've installed the beta version, and yes, it significantly speeds up the process, even if it remains slower than Zotero 7's, but not by much. Please let me know if you need anything for future investigation.