GoldenDict Forum

I have about 30 dsl dictionary. Does dictzipped dictionaries slow down the Goldendict launch or cause other performance issues?

seamoon wrote:I have about 30 dsl dictionary. Does dictzipped dictionaries slow down the Goldendict launch or cause other performance issues?

Good question! I don't have a clear answer to it though, it all depends on various conditions.

But personally, I also compress all my DSL dictionaries (and convert them to UTF8 with Unix EOLs too!). This provides significant savings in the file sizes. And my opinion is that this is more important to the performance, when you have smaller more compact files to read -- it might be faster.

I don't think that there should be any startup problems when all dictionaries are compressed, at least I haven't noticed anything like that on my side. And decompressing the articles before showing them to the user is typically *very* fast, and we are talking about just some kilobytes of data to uncompress, so for modern PCs this should not be even noticeable.

All in all, compressing the dictionaries is a good way to keep them small and doesn't affect performance, based on my tests.

seamoon wrote: Does dictzipped dictionaries slow down the Goldendict launch or cause other performance issues?

No. Always use dictzip on the dictionaries you are not currently editing. Dictzip provides huge space savings and doesn't hurt performance in any noticeable way.

ikm wrote:No. Always use dictzip on the dictionaries you are not currently editing. Dictzip provides huge space savings and doesn't hurt performance in any noticeable way.

Heh, that's much shorter version of what I was tying to say

Btw, when compressing a standard UTF-16-based DSL file, the result, while much smaller than the original, is about 10% bigger compared to the very same DSL file, but with Windows EOLs changed to Unix EOLs and converted to UTF-8 encoding. Some extra savings!

Thank you very much for the information.

What about start up times with DSL files that include lot of external resources like images and sounds? I have noticed long delays when I started to use several such dictionaries. In the other hand, I added 10+ new DSL dictionaries without external resources and I didn't notice any delay. In any case, the delay is only on startup and the tray icon appears with the tooltip "loading..."; after that the program works as usual.

ikm wrote:

seamoon wrote: Does dictzipped dictionaries slow down the Goldendict launch or cause other performance issues?

No. Always use dictzip on the dictionaries you are not currently editing. Dictzip provides huge space savings and doesn't hurt performance in any noticeable way.

chulai wrote:What about start up times with DSL files that include lot of external resources like images and sounds? I have noticed long delays when I started to use several such dictionaries. In the other hand, I added 10+ new DSL dictionaries without external resources and I didn't notice any delay. In any case, the delay is only on startup and the tray icon appears with the tooltip "loading..."; after that the program works as usual.

Do you put all your external resources into a zip file? I think this is most important trick when dealing with dictionaries with huge amount of sounds or pictures. Basically, never store media files as-is, without putting them all into a zip file, that's my rule of thumb.

Good. That was going to be my second question. I'll try and see what happens.

Tvangeste wrote:

chulai wrote:What about start up times with DSL files that include lot of external resources like images and sounds? I have noticed long delays when I started to use several such dictionaries. In the other hand, I added 10+ new DSL dictionaries without external resources and I didn't notice any delay. In any case, the delay is only on startup and the tray icon appears with the tooltip "loading..."; after that the program works as usual.

Do you put all your external resources into a zip file? I think this is most important trick when dealing with dictionaries with huge amount of sounds or pictures. Basically, never store media files as-is, without putting them all into a zip file, that's my rule of thumb.