ht:/Dig HD space consumption

[Johannes Rohr <j.rohr@gmx.de>]

Hello,

on my box the htdig package is used to index locally available
documentation. What turns out to be a problem is that while indexing
it consumes mad amounts of HD space. du -sh /usr/share/doc reveals
that I have 378 MByte of documentation installed. While indexing,
htdig consumes up to 1,2 GByte of HD space, i.e. more than three times
the size of the installed docs. Even when indexing is done, the disk
usage of /var/lib/htdig is still 600 MByte, i.e. still significantly
more than then docs themselves.

Recently, I there were several instances that my / partition
overflowed due to htdig's HD space hunger.

Is this normal? Would I have to live with it if I want a fulltext
search of my docs? Or are there suitable alternatives?

Thanks,

Johannes
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