Okey so I have found the Class instance that was holding onto the data. I can now save my image after a parsing without tripling its size.

But the VM's memory footprint (according to Windows task manager) does not falls back to normal after a parse. My guess is that now that the VM was allocated more space, it juste doesn't give it back. It still bugs me a little since I can see the memory occupied by the VM drop when minimised in the task bar.

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If you want to use a huge data structure, you have to think carefully about your representations. There are tricks you can use to conserve memory: use more primitive types (SmallIntegers, bit flags, Symbols), use shared instances, use alternatives like ZTimestamp which is half the size of DateAndTime, or use your own integer time, sparse data structures, and so on - and you can hide these optimisations behind your standard API.

I have a quick question regarding primitive type:

1 sizeInMemory -> 0
1.0 sizeInMemory -> 12

I do use a integer as my timestamp, encapsulated in a class, which also weight 12 bytes. This makes me think that the a Float weighting 12 bytes is an encapsulation of a primitive type I don't know of. If so, is it possible to not use a Float, but something like a double ?

Thomas.

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