Hierarchical segmentations and performance issues
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When widget :ref:`Segment` is applied to real, much longer texts
than *a simple example*, using such general regexes as *\\w+* or *\\w* may
result in the creation of a huge number of segments. Creating and manipulating
such segmentations can slow down excessively the execution of Orange Textable,
or even lead to memory overflow.

However, it is sometimes necessary to segment large texts into words or
letters, for instance in order to examine their frequency distribution. In
that case, if hardware allows it, a lot of time can be saved at the expense
of memory usage. Indeed, the cumulated time required to successively create
several ever more fine-grained segmentations (for instance into lines, then
words, then letters) is usually spectacularly shorter than the time required
to produce the most fine-grained segmentation directly (see :ref:`figure 1
<hierarchical_segmentations_performance_issues_fig1>` below).

.. _hierarchical_segmentations_performance_issues_fig1:

.. figure:: figures/chaining_segmentations.png
    :align: center
    :alt: chained hierarchical segmentations execute faster
    :figclass: align-center

    Figure 1: Chaining :ref:`Segment` instances to reduce execution time.

The situation is different when word or letter segmentation are conceived
as intermediate steps toward the creation of a segmentation containing only
selected words or letters. In that case, it is much more efficient (in memory
and execution time) to use a single instance of :ref:`Segment` with
a regex identifying only the desired words, as seen
:doc:`previously <segmenting_data_smaller_units>`
with the example of *\\bretriev(e|es|ed|ing)\\b*.
