[CWB] Performance of "expand to"

[Stefan Evert]

> I noticed that the performance of "expand to" is really poor.

The "expand to" part should be very fast, unless you're doing this on an s-attribute with a huge number of regions.  It's probably the query itself that is slow -- have you tried it without the expand?

> For instance a query like this on the BNC:
> 
> "paraphernalia" :: match.text_id="CM8" expand to text;

When I try this example on my Mac after warming the cache, the query is almost instantaneous both with and without the "expand to text".

> can take up to a minute to complete.

Of course, displaying the query result may take a little longer because CQP has to print an entire BNC document.  But in your example, even this is virtually instantaneous on my Mac.

> Am I doing something wrong and if I'm not, is there a way around it or is it just something I'll have to live with?

Perhaps some problem with your hard disk or so?  What does top show while the command executes?  Is CQP churning away for a minute, or is it waiting for disk access or something else?

Which version of CQP are you running? Which OS?

Best
Stefan