to be deployed Epaati version is out!

[Ties Stuij]

On Mon, Apr 21, 2008 at 3:06 PM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at tomeuvizoso.net> wrote:
>  Do you have any particular area in eToys that you would like to see
>  profiled, analyzed and maybe optimized?

Yes! Of course ;o)

Sorry for reacting so late on such an inviting mail.

One of our most pressing problems has to do with continual image
growth, when opening multiple projects. After opening and closing
around 20 projects on an XO, the amount of memory the vm uses
(according to the vm stats), has climbed from 60 to 95 mb, and soon
afterwards we get an out of memory error.

First I thought that old projects were lingering around, but they do
seem to be garbage-collected eventually. There is no reference or
pointer to them to be found in any case. I haven't had the time to do
any space profiling to see who or what could then be the cause of the
trouble.

Furthermore we would still want to see the project loading time of
projects to go down. At the moment our longest loading project still
takes around 36 secs on a good day, while most take around
twenty-something. The latest discussion on which was a bit back on
zipping project files. But that might perhaps have less chance on huge
leaps forward and easy succes, not to mention unrestrained and
neverending gratitude, as might be the result of solving the image
growth problem.

In general what we would like to see is more animation possibilities,
so anything that can make animation more efficient would be very
welcome.

Also anything that has got to do with more effective audio-handling
would be desirable. Right now we're thinking of just referencing audio
from external files, because a number of clips need to be shared, even
compressed, they take up a lot of space in audio-intensive activities
(not to be found in the released bundle, because of said restraints),
and also because everything that needs to be loaded at project loading
time prolongues the project loading.

The same could be said for images, so to rattle on, it would be nice
to pluck these kind of files from some kind of shared resource. That
would definately be an optimization in our situation, but would
perhaps be to specific of a need. I feel that the stuff we do with
Etoys isn't really the stuff that Etoys was intended for which has in
my mind more to do with explorating concepts in stead of delivering
polished applications. But I might be wrong.

Anyhow, any help on this front would of course be greatly welcomed,

/Ties