how to clear residual garbage in a stack?

[Richard Gaskin]

Does your card contain a group with its backgroundBehavior set to true?

If so, and if the cards are created with copy and paste, I believe you 
may find a large number of unplaced groups in the stack.

In the IDE menus see Object -> Place Group

If that submenu is long, you've found your culprit.

Rather than copy and paste, when creating new cards with a common 
background group can be done with the clone or create commands the cards 
will all share a common group, reducing size even before running the 
delete loop.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems


Neville Smythe wrote:

 > I am constructing a large stack as a test for a bug report (to report
 > the slow saving of large stacks for a standalone Windows 10 app under
 > LC 8.x). I start with a stack with a single card which saves as a 28
 > KB file. I then use a script to create 299 copies of card 1. The
 > resulting stack saves to a 8.2 MB file. As expected.
 >
 > I then deleted all but the first card, and re-ran the script so it
 > again had 300 cards. This saves to a 16.4 MB file! Repeating the
 > delete-and-create gives a 24 MB file. Evidently the data for the
 > deleted cards has not been removed. I can think of efficiency reasons
 > why this might be useful in the IDE, but there must/should be a way to
 > reduce the file size to a minimum, otherwise stacks which continually
 > delete and create data will just grow in a very user-unfriendly way.
 >
 > I can’t find any command such as clean or purge or free or compress or
 > release garbage which will reduce the file size to its actual
 > requirements. I have a vague memory of this being raised some years
 > ago but I can’t find the reference. Surely there must be a built-in
 > command? Because the only way I can see to reduce the size would be to
 > create a new stack and copy over all cards and scripts and substacks
 > before saving, which is ridiculous.
 >
 > BTW The bug: The 8.2MB stack saves on a Mac in 0.27 seconds. On
 > Windows 10 saving time is 6.4 seconds. Other apps on Windows save an 8
 > MB file in under a second so the problem is not with the Windows OS or
 > antivirus virus software or the particular machine. Possibly this bug
 > is related to the reported unusablility of LC 9 IDE on Windows 10, of
 > which I have heard no more since it was raised in this forum a few
 > weeks ago, although my context is a standalone compiled under LC  8.x.
 >
 > Neville Smythe