Hi

Henrik Gedenryd answered to my question 20 days ago:
>There will be a grat deal of refactoring required before the module
system
>will work to shrink the image efficiently. Even with the module system,
all
>the horrible dependencies are still there and need to be removed.

>So it will be a while before the old-style shrinking procedure will be
>superseded.

and yesterday he wrote

>But what I really wonder is what made the image grow to 15+ megs from 9
or
>so, it's nowhere near all code, I thought it was the "Welcome" projects
but
>that's just roughly a meg. It's really terrible that shrinking the image
is
>the blackest of Squeak arts.


I did a test today how to reduce the image size of a Squeak3.3a-4664.image
which is 16446kB.

I did the following steps

Select 'flaps...' and then 'destroy shard flaps'.
Manually delete the sample projects.
Execute

  Smalltalk zapAllOtherProjects

This reduced the image size to 15326KB.


Executing
  ChangeSet allInstancesDo: [:cs | cs zapHistory].
  Smalltalk garbageCollect
and saving the image showed that a new image size of 11839kB


Deleting all the ChangeSets 
  ChangeSorter removeChangeSetsNamedSuchThat:
      [:aName | (aName = 'New Changes') not]

gave a new image size of 10170kB which is a total reduction of 38%.


So the major part comes from the change sets not the example projects.


I did a similar test some last week with a 4599 image and documented it on 
http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/2182 (Smalltalk majorShrink)

It gave a 50% reduction and I still had a running system which was fairly
complete
(for my needs).

The page http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/2182 contains copies from
emails I collected
from this list.

Another test (not documented there) gave a resulting image (with
Morphic) with just 4.5 MB which was fine.

The basic conclusion is that you have to do your own version of "Smalltalk
majorShrink".

I hope this information helps.


Hannes Hirzel



P.S. Thank you, Henrik, for your work on modules! It's nice that it's now
in the 
update stream.