Solving performance problems

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Product: WSpell

Problem: When checking spelling or looking up suggestions, WSpell seems to take longer than expected.

Solutions:

  • Open dictionaries as local files. Accessing lexicon files across a network can decrease performance, since network file access is many times slower than local file access, especially over congested networks.

  • Open dictionaries containing frequently used words first. WSpell searches for words in the order in which dictionaries are opened, and stops searching once a word is found. Opening a dictionary containing words that appear frequently (such as the, of, and a) first reduces the time required to locate these words and improves overall performance. This is what the "ssceam.tlx" (or "sscebr.tlx", etc.) files are for: They contain the words that occur most often, and therefore should be opened first.

  • Open dictionaries for one language at a time. The more dictionary files WSpell must search through, the longer the search will take, particularly when locating suggestions. Don't open the American and British English dictionaries together, for example.

  • Locating suggestions using the typographical algorithm is generally faster than using the phonetic algorithm.

  • Locating suggestions using either the typographical algorithm or the phonetic algorithm is faster than using both algorithms at the same time.

  • The MinSuggestionDepth property has a direct bearing on the amount of time the Suggest method will run. Unfortunately, there is no simple way to determine in advance the minimum depth value needed for the Suggest method to locate a correct spelling. When the typographical suggestion algorithm is used, the Suggest method will find the correct replacement for a misspelled word containing a single error at depth 30 (assuming the correct spelling is in an open dictionary).

  • Enable case sensitivity by setting the CaseSensitive property to True. WSpell and dictionaries work fastest when the case-sensitive option is enabled. Disabling case sensitivity may reduce performance by as much as a factor of four. In situations where case-sensitivity is undesirable (e.g., text is entered in all-caps), better performance may be achieved by converting the text to all lower case, but keep the CaseSensitive property set to True.

  • Make sure the AllowAccentedCaps property is set to True, unless you are checking French Canadian text using Wintertree Software's French dictionary. Disabling this property will degrade performance severely when checking text containing capital letters.

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