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"Looking for words to add..."

icebear   December 14th, 2011 7:23a.m.

I've noticed recently (perhaps as my number of lists and words has grown) that occasionally Skritter will hang when looking for new words to add. This is strange as usually I have a hundred or more words awaiting reviews, and also have just one or two lists that regularly have new words - so why would it hang? It can take more than a minute while it scours for a new word.

Ok, it's nothing feature breaking, but it can be distracting, and I'm curious if it has something to do with the way that I'm organizing my lists or because I'm getting to a level where I have more characters in my words (which maybe requires checking when adding new ones?).

Antimacassar   December 14th, 2011 7:26a.m.

Maybe it's the same problem I have when I add a new word from the Miscellaneous list.

jww1066   December 14th, 2011 8:17a.m.

I've seen this many times when I study a very long list that has many items I already know. The algorithm Skritter uses seems to be something like

F: fetch N items from server
see if any of the N items is unknown
if not, goto F

whereas a more traditional database-centered application would do something like

"fetch the next item from the server"

and it would be a trillion times more efficient. :{

James

nick   December 14th, 2011 9:56a.m.

Do you see this more than once in a row? It's possible that something strange is happening to the progress within a section when you add a word to that section, but if that's the case, then you should only see this the first time you go to add a word while studying after adding a word to that section.

icebear   December 14th, 2011 10:28a.m.

If my memory is correct, typically it happens once per Skritter session, around the time when I'm hitting 100 reviews remaining (which I guess is when new words start to be added). I don't think it happens more frequently than that (i.e. not multiple delays in one session).

scott   December 14th, 2011 10:52a.m.

I see the bug. I think it's that you're finishing the list, then adding words to it, and instead of keeping you where you are at the list, it knocks you back to the beginning of the section, which is a bit more than is really necessary to make sure you've got everything added. Tweaking it now.

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