Shutdown is slow with many selections

[Andy Balaam]

If you make lots of selections of programmes FreeGuide shuts down very slowly.

We should purge out-of-date selections on exit so they don't slow us down in the future.

[Arisian (mmclagan)]

This also affects startup -- if there are a lot of selections, the startup on Linux can be painfully slow. I have two Schedules Direct lineups with an average of 110,000 programs in the 24 day window (10 before, 14 after) and it takes 3+ minutes to start up. I ended up writing a perl/bash script which cleans out the database before the program starts and it helps a lot but try leaving the program running for a couple of weeks without shutting it down and most operations become painfully slow.

[mmclagan@titan ~]$ cd .java/.userPrefs/org/freeguide-tv/modules/reminder-alarm/
[mmclagan@titan reminder-alarm]$ dir
total 720
-rw-rw-r-- 1 mmclagan mmclagan 730084 Jun 24 00:24 prefs.xml

  <entry key="favouritesList.size" value="810"/>
  <entry key="manualSelectionList.size" value="1894"/>

The attached script, called 'prefsage' is run each time I start up Freeguide so that it drops every possible selection older than the 10 day limit of the SER files. It could be run after Freeguide exits but that could leave extra selections on the next startup.

[Andy Balaam (mail-artificialworlds)]

I suggest we should purge old selections whenever we parse any XML - either on download listings, Import, or at startup if some XML is found in the working dir.

This shouldn't be a hugely difficult thing to write - I'd gladly help anyone who wanted to try it.

[Andy Balaam (mail-artificialworlds)]

Making this High importance since it can make things really bad for some users.

[Andy Balaam (mail-artificialworlds)]

We now delete all selections older than 4 weeks when we exit FreeGuide.