GoldenDict Forum

My mother language is Chinese, or Chinese have no many e-dicts, so, I have no many dicts for Chinese, and I needn't use many Chinese dicts, but sometimes, it is important to use Chinese dicts, cause I like to learn Ancient Chinese. To lunch this 《漢語大詞典》, only takes about 1 second.
But Chinese is not very international, so I also need to learn English, I have many English dicts, lunch time can be 20 minutes, this is asymmetry, for stronger function, the longger time would takes.
If I only install Chinese dicts, it would be very fast to lunch, but I learn English next time to lunch it can be very hard, cause I have to installs' before it.
If I install both English dicts and Chinese, it would be worsest at all.
I sometimes only need the "small" Chinese ones, how to solve this?!

Something is very, very wrong on your PC. It is OK when the more dictionaries you add the more time it takes to load them. But 20 minutes is WAAAAY too long. It should take seconds, not minutes.

Do you have a huge amount of sound/image files or something like that among your dictionaries? In what format are your dictionaries (dsl, mdic, stardict)?

Here's what I have on my system: about 400 dictionaries in various formats and it takes exactly 3 seconds for GoldenDict to start.

Some basic rules to optimize the startup time:

1. Never leave a huge amount of small files (mostly images, sounds, etc) as-is. Always compress into a single ZIP file (properly named).
2. Use the fastest hard disk to store the dictionaries and their indexes. I usually run GoldenDict in portable mode from an SSD drive, the speedup is huge, mostly thanks to the very fast SSD drive.