Big Flat Stacks

Paul Looney support at ahsomme.com
Tue Jun 15 16:01:02 EDT 2010


Ben,
We have found that Rev does not handle large stacks well.
Compared to HC:
1. the stacks open more slowly
2. the stacks save more slowly
3. the stacks close more slowly and
4. the stacks in Rev are much larger than they were in HC

You don't need to go the SQL route.
You can convert the HC stacks to a text file or, as you suggested, a  
custom property.
Then, compared to HC:
1. the stack will open more quickly
2. the stack will save more quickly
3. the stack will close more quickly
4. the stack in Rev will be smaller than it was in HC

Note: there is an approx. 64,000 char per line limit in fields but no  
such limit in custom properties.

Paul Looney

On 15/06/2010, at 11:25 AM, Ben Rubinstein wrote:

> I'm converting an old HyperCard stack for a client - it's a classic  
> HC as
> a single table DB job, with a bit of interesting functionality.   
> But it's big
> - slightly over 38,000 cards, all with one background; about 30 MB  
> on disk.
>
> It's _very_ slow to do various things - but possibly that's only in  
> the IDE (clients would use the stack with StackRunner or similar).   
> But doing anything with it in the IDE is a pain.
>
> The way the stack is used historically is doing simple searches,  
> and flipping through matching cards, making simple edits.  I could  
> move all the data into a SQLite db and just make a single-card Rev  
> interface; the client's used to using HC and Rev stacks so I have a  
> slight preference to keeping it as a stand alone stack working as  
> they're used to, but could overcome that if I had to.
>
> I'm sure that there is wisdom in the community about this!  Would  
> storing the
> data as stack properties and retrieving it into and out of a single  
> card be
> faster than leaving Rev to handle it as a card data?  (The data is all
> unstyled text, btw - half a dozen or so small fields, a couple of  
> largeish
> ones.)  Or is there some magic trick to make Rev handle stacks of  
> this kind
> more efficiently?  Or is it something to do with importing from  
> HC?  Or is it an IDE issue?
>
> If I do move the data into custom properties and have a single card  
> for editing, are there known benchmarks - disk space, memory usage,  
> speed - comparing one property for each 'field', or a single  
> property with '2d' keys, or those fancy new-fangled 2d arrays?   
> That is, for example:
>    the uTitles[iOldCard] of this stack
>    the uAllData[iOldCardID,"Title"] of this stack
>    the uAllData[iOldCardID]["Title"] of this stack
>
> All wisdom gratefully received.
>
> Ben
>
>
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