Speed up a slow loop

[J. Landman Gay]

On 3/8/22 10:30 AM, Alex Tweedly via use-livecode wrote:
> I guess I'm not convinced about VM space thrashing being the problem, certainly not due to the 
> wordlist. It's 2.5 Mb - i.e. 0.02% of the real RAM in a Pixel 5. There may be something else in 
> the app making the total VM space very large - but the wordlist wouldn't do it on its own.

I'm not sure either. A few days ago I did some tests trying to track the total amount of RAM 
that was used by looking at the memory stats in the developer options. I started the game, did 
some quick word lookups, quit and removed from memory, then checked usage. It isn't very 
specific but while my app was running the Pixel 6 had a maximum usage of 368MB after three 
tests, and the Pixel 5 maxed at 255MB. This isn't near the top of the list, other apps use more.

On the Pixel 5 today, with only background apps running, I'm using 55% of RAM which leaves 
3.5GB free. The Pixel 6 is using 70% with 2.4GB free. The OS on the 6 is bigger and I have more 
background processes running there.

In trying to reduce the memory footprint I wanted to see how much RAM my script locals were 
storing. The easiest way was to get the value of all of them, write them consecutively to a 
file, and let Finder tell me the size. I found that Alex's brilliant script was holding 5MB of 
data that I didn't need, so I emptied out the variables that were only used to calculate the 
board and kept the single one I needed for lookups. That file was 3K.

I need to test more today. Last night I thought I was all set, got a great board and quickly 
found 125 words. Everything was snappy and worked great. Then suddenly the app froze solid, 
nothing responded, and I had to quit to the launcher. Which was a shame because it was a really 
good board. That was before I wiped out the extra 5MB of unnecessary variable data, and there 
may be more I can do trim it down. But you'd think 2-3GB of free RAM could accomodate it.

If I can't figure it out soon, I'll give it to all of you to see if you can.

-- 
Jacqueline Landman Gay         |     jacque at hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software           |     http://www.hyperactivesw.com