Zotero very slow

iscott
I've been using Zotero for some time now, but I'm finding that it's frustrating to work with because it's so slow. I'm working with a large research database (around 7000 entries), but in EndNote things were pretty quick. Now I find that opening the database with Zotero (i.e., from opening the Zotero window until the database is populated) takes at least 20-30 seconds. Doing a quick-search for a short string can take a similar length of time. Some other database interactions take comparably long amounts of time. Is this normal? If so, is there any way that I can change the database to speed things up?

Thanks
  • iscott
    Hi again,

    Just to clarify, the speed problem shouldn't be my system. I use Zotero on a dual-core Intel desktop with 1G of memory running Windows XP, and on an Ubuntu laptop with a P4 and 2G of memory.

    Thanks again.
  • dstillman
    1) Zotero 1.5 should be much faster in certain areas than 1.0.

    2) Zotero caches a lot of data the first time Firefox is started, so if you close all Firefox windows on Windows, there will be a delay the next time you open Zotero. If you leave at least one Firefox window open, it should be faster. (This isn't an issue on OS X, where applications don't close when all windows are closed.)

    3) To speed up the quick search, type " (double quote) first to turn off find-as-you-type.

    4) We'll be optimizing Zotero 1.5 and future versions more in the future to improve performance with large libraries.
  • rickus
    edited May 25, 2011
    Hi guys,

    There are probably other threads that similar to this one, but I'd like to reopen this issue, because it appears fairly general. I'm using version 2.1.6 at the moment (Win 7, Firefox 4.0.1) and Zotero is still very very very slow on my computer:

    - starting up takes up to half a minute
    - dragging a library item into a collection: often more than half a minute, if the browser doesn't just stall and I have to force-close it
    - quick search box: after typing a couple of letters, my mouse pointer becomes the Green Wheel of Boredom and it takes more than half a minute for Zotero to come up with any results
    - adding PDFs: sometimes ok, sometimes it takes more than a minute. Sometimes Zotero just stalls and I have to force-close it.
    - Indexing PDFs manually: half a minute to several minutes per PDF. Not very useful if you're downloading lots of articles.

    I like the power and versatility, but these time lags are barely workable if you are using Zotero in a production environment (I'm trying to write papers and books, I have a large database and no time to wait a couple of minutes after adding or changing a single item).
  • arggem
    Rickus,

    Your issues #1 and #3 are answered by Dan Stillman in this very thread!

    Items #4 and #5 are related to full text indexing. check out this thread: http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/14270/zotero-is-slow/#Item_7 , I keep it turned off, then manually reindex (choose Rebuild Index, then Index Unindexed Items) periodically when I have time. Don't forget to reenter the indexing numbers.
  • rickus
    Hi arggem,

    Thanks for the link to the indexing solution. Set everything in the Indexing tab to 0 and PDFs are running very smoothly now. And I should have read Dan Stillman's comments more carefully.

    But I also wanted to point out that these problems already existed 2 years and a whole bunch of updates ago.
  • adamsmith
    that's actually not quite true and that's why it's practically never a good idea to resuscitate very old threads: There appear to be a new set of speed related issues for FF 4.0 that were not present for FF 3.6 (with both Z 2.0 and 2.1) - I've been seeing a number of reports of people who reported lags after switching to FF 4.0.
    My sense is that these don't affect all users and I'm not sure if devs know exactly what's going on (yet) but speed has improved _hugely_ since the original post here.
  • dstillman
    Closing this (very old) thread.
This discussion has been closed.