HouseBot

Scott:

Also already mentioned once, but would it be possible to keep the filesize of the HBData.mdb in the config directory automatically small.

This file grows in a matter of days from 1.5MB to over 500MB. Going into Access I can comprimate (?) <- (not sure if that is English at all) and that will reduce the file size again.
Having a small size HBData will increase my mirror sync process to keep HouseBot backupped all the time.

V3 will automatically backup and compress the config file for you.

Compressing is what I need.. Super

Richard,

I can't imagine why your database file is getting so large. Do you know why? I've been using the same database file for a few years now (no compression that I can remember) and my database is only about 20MB.

-- Dave

Richard

Are you running any scripts?? It's possible that one of the scripts is creating new instances of properties and that is causing the MDB file to grow. I'm with DL --- it should be stable in size and not grow.

Jim

Not sure why it grows. After compressing the size comes down to 1.5MB and rapidly grows afterwards again.

Mind that my setup is very extensive and almost everything is script based. But then again, so is dlmorgans..

I have many many NULL device properties that are set using scripts and I am not sure what you mean by creating new instances of properties.
A property is just addressed the way it should be. How can there be new instances of properties.

EDIT:

Lots of my NULL device properties stack log lines like CID phone logs, doorbell rings, temperature etc etc. I clean these logs many times. Could it be that cleaning these logs create empty lines in the database and when new log lines are created, a new part is allocated in this database because the old lines are different in size.
I am just thinking out loud here.

Those logs are EXTREMELY likely to be the cause of the problem. Access, as far as I can tell is designed to be a relatively simple static database where records are created and updated and remains relatively stable in size. When records are removed, I believe the space is not released and Access does not reuse this space automatically. I have seen this regularly while testing mediapro when importing large DVD Profiler xml import files and then deleting the records from the database. What started as a 2MB db easily grows to 20MB after a period of testing and I have to compress it in order to e-mail it as part of a test release. What you may need to do is build a VB script that is executed from the OS scheduler to compress the database on a regular basis

Yeah, the alpha lists must be the problem since they grow, are cleared and then grow again withot having access release the lost space.
I will just wait and see what Scott comes up with in V3.0 and if that doesn't work, I will write some script that automates this. However that might be tricky because the database only compresses when not in use by HouseBot so I would have to kill HB first and I don't like doing that. Always trying to get the most out of my uptimes.

EDIT:

Come to think of it. I also build 10KBytes lists to browse through my movies, trailers, music etc etc. They are max 10KB because larger lists will hang HB so I had to index my list at 120 entries at a time. Browsing through 920 trailers or 14000 mp3's will clean the 10KB list and rebuild it every time I index. This will rapidly increase my dbase used memory. I recently built new panels using thumbnails instead of alpha lists and that's probably why my dbase doesn't grow as fast as it used to.