Firefox freeze when attaching document

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  • Jon Rubin
    What kind of processor are you running on? I deleted pdfinfo to stop the hanging issue, but I also reduced the number of characters and pages to index as my v. old laptop was (at least appearing to) hang. Admittedly this is on a Pentium M 1500 - which is pretty slow. But it's a thought.
  • micha
    I'm using a Thinkpad SL510, with should have an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, model T6670 / 2200 MHz. The problem also occurs with smaller PDF's sometimes.
  • micha
    Am I the only one who still has this problem? Is it Ubuntu-specific?
  • micha
    Another point that _might_ be related: I encountered an indexing problem that is related to filenames. Zotero first hung when I imported (from the Springer-Site) an entry with the following attachment:
    "Sundman - 2000 - The Good Manager – A Moral Manager.pdf"
    After forced close of Firefox and reopening, Zotero did not want to index the file. However, after I changed the name to
    "sundman.pdf"
    Indexing worked again.
  • Jon Rubin
    Well it's not Ubuntu specific - I've had problems on Puppy Linux - but that's because the laptop that I run it on is old and slow. I grabbed the reference from Springer, on my Ubuntu machine, and it wouldn't index at all. Maybe it's protected, so I don't know how you managed to get that problem. But it imported just fine.
    Oops take that back - check your report errors, I've got

    [JavaScript Error: "Sundman - 2000 - The Good Manager – A Moral Manager.pdf was not indexed -- PDFs with filenames containing extended characters cannot currently be indexed due to a Firefox limitation" {file: "chrome://zotero/content/xpcom/fulltext.js" line: 476}]

    But that doesn't explain why your machine hung. Like I said my Ubuntu desktop imported it with no problem - and you shouldn't have had an indexing hang, given that it couldn't have been indexed.
    So, not much help there, sorry/
  • adamsmith
    edited July 21, 2010
    for what it's worth, I'm experiencing very similar behavior on an almost identical set-up (Ubuntu 10.04, Thinkpad, pdfinfo hangs). I don't have any time to do enough troubleshooting to narrow this down beyond "it happens frequently and irregularly and re-installing pdfinfo didn't help" - I know this isn't very helpful - I'm very busy atm - but I just wanted to flag that this isn't completely isolated.

    Edit: also not particularly slow machine - something like dual core 1.9ghz
  • dstillman
    micha: If you're getting a hang after removing pdfinfo, you'd have to tell us the last line of the real-time debug output when it hangs. The issue may actually affect pdftotext (or any external process) as well, though I don't think we've had any other reports of that.
  • micha
    Thanks, I didn't know it is so easy to produce debug-output. Since I dind't know which part you need and since it's a lot, I put it on my website:
    http://micha-h-werner.de/zotero_crash.txt
    The problem occured when I tried to import references from Jstor via a proxy, but there have been other cases where I just tried to import PDFs from my HD.
  • micha
    Hmm..., the last line seems to always look the same (and not very informative). This time:

    zotero(3): Running pdftotext -enc UTF-8 -nopgbrk -l 1000 "/home/werner/Documents/Datenbank/zotero/storage/RPBT724A/Etzioni - 1996 - The Responsive Community A Communitarian Perspect.pdf" "/home/werner/Documents/Datenbank/zotero/storage/RPBT724A/.zotero-ft-cache"

    That's all...
  • dstillman
    As far as we know this is a Firefox bug—we've seen it while calling different processes, though almost everyone who's reported it has experienced it with pdfinfo rather than pdftotext. If it is Firefox, it might be fixed in Firefox 4, which made changes to external process calling (though Zotero hasn't been fully updated to work with Fx4 yet, so I don't know if you'd have any luck with the beta (and you'd have to override compatibility checking, etc.)).
  • dstillman
    edited July 26, 2010
    I don't think I've ever actually experienced this myself with pdfinfo/pdftotext on OS X, for what that's worth (which is mostly that it makes it hard to debug).
  • adamsmith
    just FYI - I have moved pdfinfo out of my Zotero folder and get relatively frequent hangs on pdftotext (on Ubuntu). I haven't done the debugging (though would expect it to look like micha's), but the process is marked as "Zombie" in the system monitor.
    Let's hope that fixes itself with the next FF update.
  • micha
    Thanks that you looked at it. I'll just wait then and hope that my database won't get mixed up (or would it rather be advisable to turn indexing off so that I won't have to kill processes?).
    Ceterum censeo: Thanks for your great work, Zotero is really amazing!
  • regouby
    edited July 28, 2010
    This is happening on my Mac (OS X 10.5.8), but I found pdfinfo-MacIntel and pdfinfo-MacIntel.version in the zotero folder and deleted them both, restarted firefox and could then add the file. I couldn't find pdfinfo by searching Finder, so for other non-techs like me, try HD>users>(your user name)>Library>Application Support>Firefox>profiles>(yourprofile)>zotero>
  • adamsmith
    edited July 28, 2010
    it's easier than that:
    http://www.zotero.org/support/zotero_data#locating_your_zotero_library
    (pdfinfo and pdftotext are in your Zotero data folder)
  • regouby
    So much easier! thanks!
  • hcsiller
    I had the same issue with the current version of FF and Zotero on a fully updated Snow Leopard install.

    Zotero would crash FF with about 30-40% chance whenever I added links to files.

    I moved pdfinfo and pdftotext out of my Zotero profile folder - no more crashes.
  • adamsmith
    having removed pdftotext I'm not getting errors anymore, either. But it's too bad - retrieve metadata e.g. doesn't work anymore.
  • laureneparlett
    I'd like to add a data point to this issue.

    Running: Zotero 2.0.3, FF 3.6.8, Ubuntu 10.04 (kernel: 2.6.32-22).

    About 30% of the time, Zotero would hang my FF (without recovery even hours later) when attaching a citation with PDF. No real rhyme or reason.

    I just deleted both pdfinfo and pdftotext. We'll see if that makes a difference.
  • breckenr
    I'm very pleased to find this thread. I'm running Ubuntu, and found that adding a pdf attachment would consistently hang-up my entire system. I've replaced pdfinfo and pdftotxt and everything seems back to normal.
  • adamsmith
    breckenr - when you say "replaced" - did you just install fresh copies?
  • wolf29
    moving both pdfinfo and pdftotxt to a different file solves it. When I have a chance, I will move pdftotxt back in and see if the problem reappears.

    -Wolf
  • raverdugo
    In case this helps others, I had the exact same problem of FF hanging when attaching PDFs, but after reading these posts, I realized that I had two copies of pdfinfo and pdftotext. On was in the zotero's directory within the FF's profile directory- I use a custom location for my "Data Directoy" (~/Documents/zoterolib) and those binaries were there as well. Same version as the previous ones. I suppose Zotero placed them there when I told it to use that location? That was years ago and in a previous version of Zotoero, actually in a different computer, which I migrated from by moving my zoterolib directory and my FF profile to the new computer. Anyway, removing the two binaries in the zotero directory withing FF's directoy solved the problem for me and its indexing and giving me the page numbers :) .

    OSX 10.6.4, FF 3.6.11, Zotero 2.0.9, pdfinfo 3.0.2, pdftotext 3.0.2

    PS: being able to specify a directory and file template for downloaded PDF automatically, and using relative paths would be really nice, making Zotero just perfect! (at least for me) Thanks a lot for your hard work.
  • jurgenhench
    This is on ubuntu linux 10.04, XFCE4 Desktop, FF 3.6.12, latest zotero, latest PDF Indexing

    I have previously posted my problems in this (http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/14798/firefox-freeze-when-attaching-pdfs-round-2/) thread. I also read through this thread as you can see from my post in the other thread and I could find some reproducibility here: Whenever openoffice was started before a reference was actually cited (i.e. the ooo-plugin was working), then attaching PDFs hung firefox. I removed the two PDF indexing binaries from my zotero directory and firefox did not hang anymore, even if I had cited before and then added a PDF. The PDF of course won't be indexed. I then exchanged the binaries by symlinks to the corresponding PDF indexing binaries of my ubuntu system. How I did that is also explained in the other thread. Indexing works again, however zotero shows "unknown" for the indexing status. Yet, these PDFs are being indexed. I repeated the test, adding a citation in Openoffice. Again, also with the system's own PDF indexing binaries, firefox hangs.

    Now I am going to find out whether FF/zotero is actually managing to call the binaries at all or whether it fails before.

    Here one thing I did not understand in a previous post (wolf29/ Aug 24th 2010): You moved the binaries to a different place. That I get. But then, are you able to index your files or you aren't?
  • dstillman
    edited November 20, 2010
    I then exchanged the binaries by symlinks to the corresponding PDF indexing binaries of my ubuntu system.
    The system version of pdfinfo won't work—Zotero uses a modified version. This does seem to indicate, though, that it's not anything specific to our builds that is causing this, at least in your case.
    Here one thing I did not understand in a previous post (wolf29/ Aug 24th 2010): You moved the binaries to a different place. That I get. But then, are you able to index your files or you aren't?
    No. Removing the binaries from the Zotero data directory disables indexing.

    It'd be interesting to find out from other Linux users in this thread if citing in OpenOffice first (or, more generally, loading a Java test page in the browser) reproduces the problem—perhaps that's where the seemingly intermittent nature of the problem is coming from.

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