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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