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

[Trond Eivind Glomsrød]

Ales Kosir <address@hidden> writes:

> 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? 

There is currently a bug in bugzilla about this as well: 

http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=22369

(submitted last week)

I'm currently testing flyspell-buffer on /usr/share/dict/words (0.5
MB) - it's now been probably 10 minutes or so, and it has finished
35%. Aspell has also grown to about 45 MB, so I'm pretty sure there is
a memory leak there.

-- 
Trond Eivind Glomsrød
Red Hat, Inc.