[Etoys] [Squeakland] duplicate (not sibling) - garbage collection?

[Scott Wallace]

Update 1924lingeringPlayers-sw (an update published to the olpc  
etoys3.0 system in mid-March) provided (finally) a fix for this problem.

A bloated project of the sort reported by Mark, Pierre-André, and  
others, can now theoretically be slimmed by simply loading it into an  
up-to-date image, then immediately saving the project afresh.  The  
resulting new version of the .pr file should be a lot smaller.

Experience reports, positive or negative, would be welcome.  If anyone  
has a huge project that does not slim down substantially after being  
loaded and re-saved, please email it to me privately.

-- Scott


On Feb 17, 2008, at 6:57 PM, Scott Wallace wrote:

> Thank you Mark!
>
> There have been other reports recently about project-size growing  
> dramatically with each re-saving, even if no substantive change has  
> been made, but we've had difficulty reproducing the problem.
>
> Armed with your insight that the presence of "duplicates" in a  
> project seems to correlate with the rapidly-increasing-project-size  
> problem, hopefully we may now start having some success in our  
> attempts to track down and fix the problem.
>
> Cheers,
>
> -- Scott
>
>
> On Feb 15, 2008, at 8:48 AM, Mark Nelson wrote:
>
>> ... As students are
>> developing their scripts, their project files keep growing rapidly in
>> size. We start off with a 'template' project that is about 300 kB.
>> Each round of program development and debugging usually involves
>> creating and destroying multiple 'duplicates' using the above method.
>> Before long, the project files are many MB in size, even after all
>> players have been cleared from the playfield and the trashcan has  
>> been
>> emptied.  Loading and saving project files gets slower and slower.
>>
>> I've discovered this happens even if the duplicates are created using
>> the halo icon, rather than the textual script. Each duplicate that is
>> ever created seems to leave a 'ghost' that take up about 130 kB of
>> storage.  In the process of debugging their scripts, students
>> typically create and destroy dozens of 'duplicates', leading to
>> multi-MB file sizes.  This growth in file size seems to happen only
>> with 'duplicates', not with 'siblings'.
>>
>> Is there some way to do garbage collection to get rid of these
>> 'ghosts' so we can keep the file sizes manageable?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> --Mark
>>
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