Re: [aspell] Aspell, Emacs and fly-spell mode

[Ales Kosir]

Kevin Atkinson wrote:
> > I wonder whether my observations of fly-spell mode in Emacs and aspell
> > are reproducible and common.
> How does fly-spell mode work?

Ispell (Aspell) is automatically spawned on background. For entered
words, they get checked on the fly for each one. The default flyspell
behavior is to highlight incorrect words. The command flyspell-buffer
checks the entire buffer in the background, communicating with the
spawned aspell process. 

Here is a short description of 
;; Flyspell is a minor Emacs mode performing on-the-fly spelling
;; checking.
;;
;; To enable Flyspell minor mode, type Meta-x flyspell-mode.
;; This applies only to the current buffer.
;;
;; Note: consider setting the variable ispell-parser to `tex' to
;; avoid TeX command checking; use `(setq ispell-parser 'tex)'
;; _before_ entering flyspell.
;;
;; Some user variables control the behavior of flyspell.  They are
;; those defined under the `User variables' comment.

> > In the command flyspell-buffer, the process
> > size of aspell grows rather rapidly from starting 8 MB to 15 MB in a
> > minute, until most of the available system memory is eventually
> > exhausted.
> Are you checking English text files?

Yes. But the behavior is not language/dictionary dependent.

> > That happens even in connection with rather short text files (something
> > like 1 MB long).
> 1 MB is NOT a small text file.

Well. The process of checking aspell README file (417 lines) will grow
from initial 6 MB to little more than 11 MB. And it seems that the size
grows exponentially. At least for me it is not possible to check files
that are more than 500 KB long. The process size grows rapidly to 100
MB. 

Anyone experiences the same? 

Best regards,
Ales