There's got to be a better way

[Richard Gaskin]

ron barber wrote:
> On Apr 12, 2005, at 7:38 PM, Richard Gaskin wrote:
>> Here's a tip to get even better performance (sometimes as much as two 
>> or three times more): use a field in an unopened window for the 
>> translation.
>>
>> When a field is on the current card, even if hidden, it's initialized 
>> with additional things that don't come into play when accessing a 
>> field on an unopened card.
> 
> I'm a little confused about the unopened part.
> 
> Is the unopened card on the stack that you are working on but on  "cd 2" 
> or is the unopened cd on a separate stack altogether (a substack for 
> example)? I thought that refering to a fld in an unopened stack would 
> open that stack?

The field can be on any unopened card to get the optimized performance, 
whether in the same stack or a substack or a separate stack file.  I 
tend to use a substack to hold miscellaneous parts, so that's why I 
mentioned a stack, but really any of those will do.

Stack files are not "opened" per se when you merely read or write 
properties or object contents from them, in the sense that they do not 
appear visually and do not recieve the opening messages (preopenstack, 
preOpenCard, openStack, openCard, etc.).

But stack files are read from disk and loaded into memory in order to 
access those properties.

Substacks, on the other hand, are already in memory if the mainstack is 
in memory since the entire stack file is read at once.

So if the choice is a stack file that's not already open, it will indeed 
required it to be read into RAM so a substack or second card would be 
faster.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Media Corporation
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