Concerned about files size in RW (8.6.2)

[Kevin_Atkins]

I’m working on a number of sites made in RW, but one in particular is concerning me due to its file size.

I have a site for press releases (not yet live), that so far has a few pages short of 100 pages (~2 year’s worth of press releases). I’m using Lode theme (by multithemes), and most pages are stacks pages. All use only a small selection of basic stacks (text, image, html, button, columns, etc), and all follow the same format. I’m using Partials for footers and headers across pages, and very little custom CSS (in the global code area, not each page).

At the moment, with all images warehoused (and only a few logos saved in Resources as remote resources), the file size is a staggering 1.56GB. Isn’t that a bit excessive? There’s no special JS, code, or other added.

Looking into the RW file package contents, I can see references to pages that don’t exist. I used an existing file as a base, to ensure continuity of styles, etc, and is seems to be retaining these pages, despite them being delete at the start of the process (before the 100 or so pages were created).

Is there anyway to ‘flush’ these files from the RW project, or is this a bug? With about five more year’s worth of press releases, each with about 50 per-year, I’m reluctant to continue, in case the file becomes too large or flakey to operate with.

Is this a case of having to start from scratch, and drag-drop the 100 pages into a new file? Is there some other way to reduce chaff in the master file? I have another master file, for a separate site, that has many more animations, graphics, and mixed remote and local resources, that’s less than 500MB, and that has getting on for around 270 pages.

I’ve already split this press release section from the original main site, into its own RW file. But that brings it’s own complications, particularly when other areas of the site get updated. Splitting further, such as into individual years, would likely make updating even more problematic, particularly for maintaining navigation and cross-page links across masters.

Any help / guidance on reducing the file size, or deleting ghost data, is much appreciated.

[Mathew (Mathew Mitchell)]

The short answer: Yes, this sounds huge and you should be concerned.

What exactly is the format of the press releases? It sounds like they might be large images. I suppose they could be short videos. At any rate, it does not sound like the are simple text. Could you clarify?

[Kevin_Atkins]

Hi Matherw.

I thought it was a tad large. I’ve seen some large master files before, but they were choc full of assets and custom code.

Because I’m going through an archive (from 2013), I’ve purposely tried to make them light and quick to make. All images are optimised JPEGs, all are warehoused, none are stored in any way in RW resources, and the text is plain-text in a Text stack. I’ve also levered the theme’s features as far as possible, rather than add extra stuff. The most ‘complex’ stack in use is the excellent S4S UsefulStack, and that is solely to provide an over-width ExtraContent area for the footer.

But, corruption is definitely the issue: a quick test with a single year of releases (about 70 pages) gave me a file under 20MB! Even though the big version was opening fine, and not lagging, the fact it had so much chaff in it concerned me. I think this may be a hangover from RW crashing or freezing with the file in the past. I added another year’s worth, and it only went up by a few MB, so something broken for definite.

I was concerned about the amount of work even simply dragging-dropping pages would be, but it’s not too bad, in fairness. I may have a few hundred pages to go over, but I only need to check the folder name (which changes, on copy, to ‘page-#’), and on-page links for about a third of the total pages(these referenced pages in the corrupt file). The pages can’t be dragged as nested groups, sadly, but I can take multiple pages at once, and re-nest.

I have a few live projects, so I’m being watchful of ballooning sizes, although I think it’s unlikely I’ll see too many reoccurrences.