Lexique Pro freezing

[Wayne Leman]

Sorry for posting about Lexique Pro in this group, but I know quite a
few of you probably use LP with Toolbox, as I do. For several years LP
has been freezing up on my computer after I use it for a while. This
month I bought a new computer with more RAM and lots of hard drive
space, hoping to reduce how often LP freezes. When it freezes I have to
reboot my computer. Freezing is increasingly happening as my Toolbox
lexicon increases in size. I'm approaching 20,000 entries with lots of
example sentences and audio files.

Have any of you experienced LP freezing? If so, do you have any
solutions other than rebooting?

Wayne

[bart-jacquel...@sil.org]

Did a quick search and found this :  kinyarwanda english dictionary lexique pro setup .. Download Lexique Pro. ... The largest update is the Georgian dictionary, our previous wordlist used romanized ... 3,500 entries, but the new wordlist displays Georgian characters and has about 50,000 entries.

So it would seem 20.000 is definitely not too much for lexique pro. Your audio files may be what Lexique_pro has difficulty with. You could try to batch process the quality of the audio files (whilst keeping the originals) so the file sizes become smaller (=creating new audio files in one go through a batch process). You would not have to change anything in the database, the audio file-names remain the same. But of course be sure to keep your originals somewhere save if you need to switch back. It is basically swapping the bigger audio files in the background for smaller ones with the same name and path .... 

You could also try to take your date to someone with a really powerfull  PC that has a XEON multiple core processor. The `freeze` may be due to the processor just taking its time (just guessing here).

Or you could try writing Gary Holton, the Director of the Alaska Native Language Archive, who have used Lexique Pro a lot .... 

[Wayne Leman]

Thank you, Bart, for all those helpful ideas. Yesterday I remembered that Karen Buseman had mentioned to me not too long ago that her husband had to update Toolbox because of how it was interacting poorly with Dropbox. Well, I've been directly saving all my dictionary data, managed by Lexique Pro, to Dropbox for many years. So yesterday I experimented by saving my lexical files to a local drive on my computer, instead of Dropbox. So far Lexique Pro has not frozen and I have given it a good workout today. If interaction with Dropbox is the issue, its inability to keep up with saves in Lexique Pro and Toolbox databases is confirmed once again. I still back up my lexical files to Dropbox at the end of the day.

BTW, I'm from Alaska and have interacted with Gary and the team there at the Native Language Archive. Thanks for mentioning them. I grew up in a village where we still spoke our village language, so I've been part of a dictionary project for our language, managed by Toolbox and LP, which we share with the archives.

Wayne

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[ToolBox Support]

Thanks, Wayne, for sharing both the technical and the personal information. 

It's too bad that programs have problems with Dropbox. There's a lot to like about it. But I wouldn't have guessed at the solution to your "freeze". 

Karen

Toolbox Support

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[ToolBox Support]

Wayne has shared further information:

Extensive work with Lexique Pro since I posted the discovery that
Dropbox could keep up with saves and so LP froze. Not a single freeze
since then.

I also struggled lots under Windows 10 with recording levels for
recording sound files for the dictionary database. The issue was solved
after I pulled an old audio mixer board and external semi-professional
mic out of storage and added it to my Windows 10 recording setup.

Just little bits of info which might help someone else with similar issues.

posted by Toolbox Support w/ Waynes' permission

[Wayne Leman]

Oops, my typo: "Dropbox couldn't keep up"

Wayne

[ToolBox Support]

You know, I read that and thought ?? and went right on.

Thanks for correcting it.

Karen

Toolbox Support

[hattonjohn gmail]

Some background that may be helpful when using legacy software like Lexique Pro with dropbox. Software that writes files expects to "own" those files. If they write something to disk and then, say, want to write something more a moment later, they don't expect anything to have "locked" the file in the intervening milliseconds. It's like setting a bowl on the counter while you are cooking and reaching for it, only to find someone has come into your kitchen and is holding onto it, but just for a moment. This is what Dropbox does, and it causes rare crashes/freezes. Software tools that I'm involved with nowadays go to painful lengths to be prepared for this interference. This also makes them more robust against interference from antivirus programs. But lexique pro is from a simpler time.

A second level of Dropbox "awareness" would be to cope with the possibility that changes from a colleague could come in at any moment. Without this awareness, their work will be lost the next time you save. This is much harder for software to deal with. In Bloom, we are rolling out a "check in / check out" system to deal with this.

John Hatton Bloom Product Manager Colorado, USA. Mountain Time, UTC-7