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

[Scott Wallace]

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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