Moby Dick Workout
The article discusses a test to evaluate the performance of productivity apps, specifically their ability to handle large amounts of user-generated content. The test, called the Moby Dick Workout, involves opening and manipulating the text of Moby Dick to assess the app's speed and responsiveness. The author uses this test to evaluate the performance of their own app, Bike Outliner, and provides test files in various formats for others to use.
- ▪The Moby Dick Workout test is used to evaluate the performance of productivity apps.
- ▪The test involves opening and manipulating the text of Moby Dick to assess the app's speed and responsiveness.
- ▪The author provides test files in various formats, including bike, OPML, and Markdown, for others to use.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Hogbaysoftware |
| Canonical URL | https://www.hogbaysoftware.com/posts/moby-dick-workout/ |
| Publication time | Sun, 05 Jul 2026 04:30:33 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-05T05:25:14.006Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-05T05:25:14.006Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | BOL1lae8vLG1 |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Moby Dick Workout 12 Apr 2022 How many items should your todo list handle? Not the most pressing question in the world, but one that I sometimes wonder about. I think productivity apps should scale to “user generated” content. I don’t expect every app to load multi-gigabyte log files, but it should handle what I can write myself. I use “Moby Dick” to test that. I know it’s longer and uses bigger words than anything I’ll write. If the app works well with “Moby Dick” then that’s a good indication that it will handle my needs also. Here’s the test: Open “Moby Dick”. Fast? Scroll to end. Resize the window. Fast? Scroll to middle. Resize the window. Fast? Select all. Cut, Paste, Undo. Redo. App still standing? Edit some content near the middle.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Hogbaysoftware.
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