Something odd is going on with the Tracer -- it produces an image somewhat bigger than 6Mb, which starts up ok and saves back to 4-ish MB. Rather spoils the 'coffee-break garbage collector' story doncha think? It seems to be a recent problem, as older images clone same/smaller as appropriate. I though it might be related to the Display size/depth, but seem to have ruled that out. Maybe the WeakArrays need more careful cloning?
Methinks it's because Squeak compresses all its Forms in a normal snapshot, but the image running the systemTracer will have expanded many of them (such as fonts). I would try Form shutDown at the beginning of writeClone. Also, I'm not sure if we clamp the displayScreen. If not, that would make a difference, or you could at least go to color depth 1 before writing the image.
Hope this helps.
- Dan