To what unpredictability and fragility do you refer?  If you're
referring to the override of DNU, then you appear to be singling out
this one use of it without proposing a better alternative or
complaining about other uses of it as "unpredictable".  Why?

Given your own record advocating for the most insidious and dangerous
types of bugs that silently corrupt data (notably, the deeply flawed
ideas about the Auto-Timezone). I suppose you would prefer something
that simply nil's out the ancestry so that when someone saves it,
they're saving a corrupt package?

That's would be a lot worse than an "unpredictable" delay.

On Fri, Jan 19, 2018 at 5:50 AM, Bert Freudenberg <bert@freudenbergs.de> wrote:
> On 19 January 2018 at 05:30, Chris Muller <ma.chris.m@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> It wasn't clear to me that your bloated image issue was related to
>> MCInfoProxy at all -- you said it showed ByteArray's and Bitmaps as
>> the top, but the Proxy wasn't agitated until you ran the
>> pointer-finder.
>>
>> As I mentioned, the intention of the design is to allow purging the MC
>> ancestry to recover that memory for building a smaller, tighter
>> production image, without losing the ability to access it,
>> transparently, if needed.  Because no one would want to accidentally
>> save a version with the ancestry gone (corrupt), right?  This design
>> requires
>> no extra thinking, just a little extra waiting.  Conceptually, that
>> feels like a classic cache, to me.  If there's a glitch in how it
>> interacts with MC that could be improved, we should fix it.  I'm
>> curious what else was on that stack..
>
>
> I've voiced my criticism of that design before, so I'll just point out that
> it's exactly this unpredictable nature of proxy interactions that makes it
> fragile.
>
>> I agree, though, it isn't needed on the UI menu, so we should remove
>> it.  It's something one would normally only call from a
>> deployment/build script.
>
>
> +1
>
> If even Master Eliot is confused, we really should not expose it with one
> tempting click ;)
>
> - Bert -
>
>
>>
>>
>> Best,
>>   Chris
>>
>> On Thu, Jan 18, 2018 at 9:43 PM, Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> > Hi Chris,
>> >
>> > On Thu, Jan 18, 2018 at 7:20 PM, Chris Muller <asqueaker@gmail.com>
>> > wrote:
>> >>
>> >> Hi Eliot,
>> >>
>> >> It sounds like you selected 'flush cached versions and ancestry' from
>> >> the Repository menu of the Monticello Working Copy browser.
>> >>
>> >> That's something that you would only want to do for a production
>> >> deployment image where you aren't planning to do any more development
>> >> in.  It saves memory on ancestry while providing a dynamic (albeit,
>> >> slow) means of loading it back on the rare case that one would need to
>> >> do that in the production image ever again.  The PointerFinder is not
>> >> sensitive enough for proxies, so using it ends up agitating them into
>> >> reification, forcing the dynamic reload of ancestry like you
>> >> experienced.
>> >>
>> >> What you want is simply, "flush cached versions" and then you'll never
>> >> have that issue.
>> >
>> >
>> > Can you explain?  How does this create the issue?  Why have an item like
>> > "flush cached versions and ancestry" if its dangerous.  The implication
>> > of
>> > :cached" is that the information can be rebuilt when required.  The
>> > ancestry
>> > is out there in the .mcz files.  I don't understand what's going on
>> > here.
>> > feels like a bad design decision.
>> >
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>  - Chris
>> >>
>> >> On Thu, Jan 18, 2018 at 5:24 PM, Eliot Miranda
>> >> <eliot.miranda@gmail.com>
>> >> wrote:
>> >> > Hi All,
>> >> >
>> >> >     I've been experiencing image save slowdowns recently and finally
>> >> > my
>> >> > work
>> >> > image reached 1.%Gb and I thought I better take a look:
>> >> >
>> >> > Sisyphus.Cog$ ls -lh SpurWork64.* save/SpurWork64-*
>> >> > -rw-r--r--@ 1 eliot  staff    28M Jan 18 12:47 SpurWork64.changes
>> >> > -rw-r--r--@ 1 eliot  staff   1.6G Jan 18 12:48 SpurWork64.image
>> >> > -rw-r--r--@ 1 eliot  staff    28M Jan 18 12:03
>> >> > save/SpurWork64-2018-01-18.changes
>> >> > -rw-r--r--@ 1 eliot  staff   1.5G Jan 18 12:03
>> >> > save/SpurWork64-2018-01-18.image
>> >> >
>> >> > I ran a space analysis and found that Bitmap and ByteArray were the
>> >> > top
>> >> > two,
>> >> > so I looked for large Bitmaps.  I found three that fit this
>> >> > criterion:
>> >> >
>> >> >
>> >> >     Bitmap allInstances select: [:bm| bm size >= 1000000 and: [bm ~~
>> >> > Display
>> >> > bits]]
>> >> >
>> >> > I inspected the three and did a chase pointers on one of them.  As I
>> >> > did
>> >> > that suddenly
>> >> > a) the inspector on the Array became empty (still an array but zero
>> >> > elements)
>> >> > b) the progress bar for Downloading FlexibleVocabularies-who.NN
>> >> > appeared
>> >> >
>> >> > I interrupted this and did a very cursory stack examination. Some
>> >> > object
>> >> > had
>> >> > not understood isLiteral and from there what looked like an attempt
>> >> > to
>> >> > turn
>> >> > this stub into a real object caused FlexibleVocabularies-who.NN to
>> >> > start
>> >> > to
>> >> > download.
>> >> >
>> >> > I threw away the debugger, ran the GC and suddenly all my free space
>> >> > was
>> >> > back.  So now on disc I have
>> >> >
>> >> > Sisyphus.Cog$ ls -lh SpurWork64.* save/SpurWork64-*
>> >> > -rw-r--r--@ 1 eliot  staff    28M Jan 18 15:17 SpurWork64.changes
>> >> > -rw-r--r--@ 1 eliot  staff    57M Jan 18 15:17 SpurWork64.image
>> >> > -rw-r--r--@ 1 eliot  staff    28M Jan 18 12:03
>> >> > save/SpurWork64-2018-01-18.changes
>> >> > -rw-r--r--@ 1 eliot  staff   1.5G Jan 18 12:03
>> >> > save/SpurWork64-2018-01-18.image
>> >> >
>> >> > What is going on here?  There seems to be a very bad storage leak.
>> >> > Can
>> >> > we
>> >> > please discuss this?  This doesn't seem like healthy behaviour at all
>> >> > :-)
>> >> >
>> >> > _,,,^..^,,,_
>> >> > best, Eliot
>> >> >
>> >> >
>> >> >
>> >>
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > --
>> > _,,,^..^,,,_
>> > best, Eliot
>>
>
>
>
>