Question: INI file purging for efficiency and stability (or just good luck??)

[Jon R]

Hi everyone,

Having rediscovered this group I decided to pay more attention to my housekeeping, and being a somewhat intensive aka obsessive user of TDL, one step is to purge my INI file... in the interests of an improvement in speed and stability.

So I had neglected this for a long old while and it had grown to 3.5MB - being 65k lines. After stripping out all the FileStates elements relating to each TDL file it is now a more reasonable 2k lines long. My superstition/paranoia hopes that this action will stave off any crashy behaviour - although to be completely fair the software has been rock solid for months. I have actually had Excel crash more often recently.

Mine grew to such a size bc I am a chronic change addict always creating new TDLs and the contents morph and migrate... but the INI never forgets a file! So it was an uncomfortable few minutes being presented with my guilty secret of so many mis-steps and dead ends ... in fact some I did not even remember creating. And I am just one user, not a team, so I imagine that some work environments can cause the INI to grow at quite a rate due to the turnover of TDL filenames in use.

More consistent users with a few TDLs should not suffer this fate. But a look at the INI in a text editor might be instructive in any case.  I also assume that savvy users can even edit the INI manually (can anyone confirm if they do this, and how/why?). I read somewhere on the forum that keeping multiple INIs in play is also a valid way to provide a user with multiple 'flavours' of TDL e.g. work and home.

I am using NP++ as a text editor, which has handy coder tools and recognises the types of file it opens, rewarding the user with colours and structured layout. But I guess I am probably preaching to the choir on this forum...

And the nuclear option (e.g. to recover from a crash or corruption) is perhaps to delete the INI and start from scorched earth... but this is probably unnecessary given that the file is human readable and editable. Deleting the INI would mean starting as if you had just installed the software, losing your saved settings and so forth (well, for me because I'm using the option to keep settings in the INI -I assume if you use the registry option this isn't such a problem in fact? But I would have to defer to more knowledgable persons for confirmation... Dan?)

Probably the frequency of releases of new revisions of the software is enough to keep people's INI file size in check, but I also read that some people install manually and copy back their old INI, so maybe not.

Anyway I hope the above is of interest/useful to somebody.

Jon

[.dan.g.]

'7.2 > Tools > Cleanup Ini Preferences'

[Jon R]

Dan thank you again - I will get v7.2 as soon as I sort Windows out, sounds like I am behind the times!