Dictionnary : always mega slow ?! :-(

[Hal Burgiss]

On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 1:22 PM, Vincent Trouilliez
<vincent.trouilliez at modulonet.fr> wrote:
>
> A few days ago, I started using the Dictionnary that's in the
> Application's menu.
>
> I am having a problem: it is MEGA slow to respond !
> I mean, when I type a word in the search box and press Enter, it takes
> literally 30 seconds to come up with the word's definition !
> Worse : during all that time, it doesn't show ANY sign indicating that
> it's actually working/budy. The mouse cursor does' change for the "hour
> glass" shape, or anything whatsoever. So at first, I used to think the
> dictionnary simply crased or was buggy in some way, so I closed it long
> before it managed to serve me the word's definition.
>
> Is it just me or does every body witness a similar behaviour ?

Its just you! j/k.

Its not the application (probably), but the server response thats
slow. Try changing servers.

I use these two:

server dict0.us.dict.org
server alt0.dict.org

The protocol is very fast. Using the command line client:

$time dict test
[...]
real	0m0.468s
user	0m0.008s
sys	0m0.020s

.46 seconds to contact the server and spit out a lengthy response.
Actually, pretty impressive.

> It just makes the dictionnary unusable.. is there a way to install a
> local copy of the dictionnary(ies), so that it can work off-line rather
> than having to rely on the internet all the time ?

Never tried it, but surely so. I think a lot of that comes from
dict.org. Ubuntu installs the server daemon (dictd) by default IIRC,
when you install the client pieces. Not sure if the dictionary data is
included or you have to scrape that from a dictd server somewhere.

My home Ubuntu system was almost non-usable. Ubuntu had set the first
server as localhost, which was not set as a dict server. Commenting
that out, fixed my problem.

PS -- I assuming the gnome client you have is using the same core
subsystems as I reference. If not, there probably are other clients. I
prefer the command line one myself.

-- 
Hal