LWT is painfully slow

[arthaey]

So I have my own private, single-user installation of LWT, and it's painfully slow. I'm trying to figure out if it's just what everyone puts up with, if maybe I need to archive some texts (does that help?), or if there's something else I can do to speed it up to useable load times.

I use LWT a lot and for learning languages from scratch I find it absolutely amazing.

@Blaurebell: What's your experience been like, re: loading times for LWT?

[blaurebell]

@Blaurebell: What's your experience been like, re: loading times for LWT?

As long as I don't keep too many texts active it's not slow. Usually I don't have more than 20 at a time. Mostly short ones. Occasionally I put a whole novel in, but I archive every text immediately when I'm done with it.

[Brun Ugle]

It sometimes takes me several tries to make it start, but it isn't usually slow. Once, I tried putting a whole novel in at once, cut into chapters, and then it got a bit slow. Try archiving any texts you don't need. That should speed it up.

[arthaey]

Oh. I had several novels, so hundreds, probably thousands, of unarchived texts. Let me go archive those and see if that helps!

I'll also go look for that forked version...

[blaurebell]

Display translations of terms with status(es) in the reading frame

I wonder, can that be turned off? I don't really want to see the translation until I click on the word, because the prompt to remember helps me to learn. The rest of the functions look pretty interesting though.

[blaurebell]

Yeah you can turn them off - you can set it to only display the translation for any status you like. So you can have it show translations for every word you already know, for words with status '5' only, for words at status '1' only etc.

Sounds good! But then, I'm really hesitant to update. Right now it simply works for me, so I'm not sure I should be changing anything.

[blaurebell]

You don't update - you install separately and although texts from one will appear on the other, they don't interfere with each other. Obviously the words saved on one affect words saved on the other but none of the unique features of the newer one affect the older one. Not in my case anyway.

But wait, if they are using the same database, how could the size of the DB be optimised with one version and still work with the other version? I assumed that they use a different database altogether ...?

[Cainntear]

You don't update - you install separately and although texts from one will appear on the other, they don't interfere with each other. Obviously the words saved on one affect words saved on the other but none of the unique features of the newer one affect the older one. Not in my case anyway.

But wait, if they are using the same database, how could the size of the DB be optimised with one version and still work with the other version? I assumed that they use a different database altogether ...?

Either the problem in the original wasn't the database itself, but rather how LWT inserted data into it, or the author of the forked version has used some kind of "deduplication" -- i.e. storing repeated data once, and linking to that from elsewhere. So someone querying the database directly sees "I know what you mean," he said. but the internal storage is just a few numbers pointing to pre-built phrases.

[blaurebell]

Not a clue.

If i go on the new one that i use, i have texts i've recently imported. I've not used the other one for at least 4 or 5 months, but that also has texts i've recently imported on it, but they appear blank, with no words to each text. If i then click 'edit' the text comes up in the edit box, if i click save it then saves as a normal text with all the terms etc in there.

Ah ok, then it's not entirely compatible, that makes sense. I'll keep pondering it for a bit. So far I'm still a tad sceptical, because I can't quite see the advantages yet. Are the statistics any better?

[blaurebell]

Nah they're exactly the same. There's not much 'functionally' better except the translation under words, text-to-speech, different 'themes' for the interface and ability to make massive phrases.

Ah, so very long sentences? I think I ran into that problem only with transcripts of rambling speech. Not the kind of stuff I reach much anyway. The rest of the functionality seems pretty unimportant to me. With my mac I use text-to-speech all the time with LWT which is pretty alright as TTS goes.

Now I'm totally sold on not changing anything. Some lovely pie charts and more stats over database development over time would be nice, but well ...