[squeak-dev] Re: to be deployed Epaati version is out!

[karl]

Ties Stuij wrote:
> 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.
>   

I think there was a fix for this in the etoys 3.0 upadate stream.

> 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.
>   

Since you use your own image, epaati, you could just load all the 
projects and save the image with them loaded. You would have a giant 
image but switching would be quick. External projects is more a feature 
of etoys to make projects shareable and keep the image 'clean'.

Karl
> 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
>
>
>