Manual spellcheck crashes Flare

[Blenner]

Although I haver the auto spellcheck on permanently, I want to run a full manual spellcheck before releasing a draft document for review.

Flare starts the check OK but gradually slows down until it finally crashes. I'm assuming this is because it opens every file for checking and eventually exhausts all system resources.

I'm asking it to check all files in the project. There are 244 topics in total (the topics folder totals about 1.5 MB space). This is on a Windows 7 system with 12 GB of RAM.

Any suggestions or explanations?

Thanks.

[Nita Beck]

Wow, that's a lot of RAM so that shouldn't be a problem. And a 244-topic project is not all that big.

Have you tried spell-checking a folder at a time, instead of the whole project at once? Does that help?

[Blenner]

Thanks for the response Nita.

Yes, that's what I thought: 12 GB RAM should be generous (oh and the processor is an i7 too).

I've all the topics in the same folder as there's a lot of crossover between the TOCs (there are eight subtly different targets - mixed between PDF and Webhelp). So it'd be a significant piece of work to split over several folders.

Even if I did that - and the spellchecker then ran OK - it doesn't get to the bottom of why the spellchecker doesn't run now on what we both feel is a plausible scenario. Also, it's not clear to me at what total number of topic files the spellchecker begins to ail, so no pointer to what my maximum size of folder should be.

If other people aren't seeing the same issue, I have to wonder if there's something about my configuration that's causing it? I'm puzzled by that, mind you, as I can't think of any unusual s/w (nothing beta for example) or set up I'm running.

[NorthEast]

I don't often run a full spell check, but have done so with large projects (2000+ topics). Flare would slow down when I had made changes to around 30-40 topics, at which point I'd usually save and close all of the open topics, then continue spell-checking (without closing the spell-check).

Flare will also prompt you to close topics if there are a lot open at the same time, although I usually intervened and manually closed them before reaching that point.

So, it may not be the total number of topics in the project that is the problem, but the amount of topics you make changes to during the spell check, as these remain open in the editor.

[Blenner]

Hi Dave - thanks for the useful pointers: I'll try the idea of stopping at regular intervals to save/close groups of topics.

Does Flare close a topic after the spellcheck has passed over it and there've been no changes? I'm not sure, but my impression is Flare keeps all topics open?

I wasn't aware of Flare prompting me to close too many open topics but that may well be because I'm too focussed on rapidly clicking the 'add to dictionary' or 'ignore' buttons....

In any case, Flare seems to regard those actions as 'changing' the topic so keeps them open: in fact, the number of spelling errors is v small (I did a sideways shift into Word to use its spellchecker and found a total of only four actual errors).

As you'll gather from that, I'm applying the spellcheck at the end of my docs development process as a last sanity check and a piece of good practice. Ideally, therefore, I'd like it to be a quick and simple task.

Thanks again.

[NorthEast]

Flare definitely used to prompt you to close topics, although I can't verify if that's still the case in v9. You need to have quite a lot of topics open to see it, and I used to find Flare was starting to run slow before it reached that point.

The ignore function does edit the file, it actually adds all of the ignored words to the html tag in the topic (MadCap:ignoredWords=" ...").
After a while, you can accumulate a ridiculously large list of ignored words.

If you add words to the dictionary, it adds them to a dictionary file (in Project/Advanced) and shouldn't alter the topic.
I tend to add words to dictionary rather than use ignore, and have built up a fairly comprehensive dictionary file which I re-use in each project.

[Blenner]

Yes - dictionary is my preference too.

Ignore's useful for 'none' words (like filenames, bits of code etc) - as far as I can see, Flare's manual 'don't-worry-about-this-word' mechanism has too narrow a focus and is too long-winded to use easily.

[Blenner]

Just to confirm that Flare does indeed close a topic after checking the spelling and has found nothing wrong.

Dave's technique of closing opened files from time-to-time works well and does the trick for me.

[TheGreatAndPowerfulOz]

I decided to run a full-project spell check today and soon ran into the system resources issue that's been reported here (Windows 7, 8 Gb RAM, i5 CPU).

I don't really think it matters how many files actually get changed in the process of spell checking; it seems more to do with Flare's action of opening, then closing topics one after another. I say this because I saw the issue even when no files were found to have spelling errors by the time Flare crashed. I guess I'm a really good speller!

After having Flare crash on me a couple of times, I decided to open the Task Manager and keep an eye on the memory consumed during the spell-check process. It jumped up by about 100,000 K with the open and close of every few topics, quickly reaching crazily high amounts of memory consumption.

I think Flare just has an issue with releasing memory once it's consumed it during the process of opening files, analyzing them for spelling errors, then closing them again. Has anyone submitted a bug to MadCap about this yet? If not, I think I will.

[TheGreatAndPowerfulOz]

With a couple of thousand topics and snippets in my project, I couldn't handle having to spell check just a handful of them, close Flare and re-open (to release resources), then rinse and repeat over and over...

So, I opted to download and install a little utility called MicroSpell http://www.microspell.com/ to do the job. It's pretty old (last update in 2004) and the UI took a little getting used to, but once I had the hang of it I got through all my files in the space of about 30 minutes! Not a bad workaround for a little searching on the Web and no money out of pocket!

Hopefully, MadCap will get the memory leak fixed for Flare's spell checker and I can try using it again. I really think Flare is a fantastic product, overall. Too bad for the need to occasionally "cheat on MadCap" by using other products.

[Msquared]

If the problem goes away when you spell check in smaller groups, if you haven't already done so, you may like to report this as a bug, and send them your project which reproduces the problem (if you are OK doing that).

This may be the same as a problem that I have and have reported but they can't reproduce. If I have many topics open (say around 80 to 100) and do a bit of work in several of them, Flare eventually crashes. MadCap can't reproduce this, and say they can open many topics simultaneously with no problem. But I think it only happens when some of the opened files have been edited (as it looks like you are doing). I suspect it may be triggered when the autosave kicks in every 5 minutes looking for changed files to save. Eventually, if I have lots of topics open, something clashes and the whole thing dies. It doesn't look like a memory leak to me, although of course it may be, but I notice no performance issues before the crash.

MadCap couldn't understand why I'd want to have so many files open at once. I'm glad you've got a good explanation for that. I think they thought I was a bit mad, but it's the sort of thing you do after you've imported lots of new content into Flare, and are working through each topic tidying things up, or checking some aspect of the conversion.