Saturday, September 9, 2006 - Sat, 9 Sep 2006

I heard from someone that Behold would take a long time to open his 39,000 name family tree. That’s right, its a problem. And that’s what I’m now working towards, to make it faster and thus allowing it to load larger trees. My Behold FAQ currently says Behold should handle 30,000 names with 512 MB of RAM. But I have added a lot to the Everything Report, in terms of cross references and including the rest of the data. Currently, it seems that it takes a minute to load a 10,000 name file. A 30,000 name file takes quite a bit longer. So I’ve still got some work to do before Behold will be truly useable for very large family files. Even a minute is much too long for my liking. I’m continuing to work on it.

I’ve taken a look at my procedure that counts ancestors and descendants. The numbers are only used in the Name window display. I looked at one particular test file, a Royal.ged file that is much bigger than the sample one supplied with Behold. That file connects the Royalty back to Adam and Eve (whether that’s done correctly or not is a matter of debate), but it results in a multi-connected families going to a depth of 132 generations. Well, the Eltree component I use for the Behold’s Treeview had a limit of 99, so the Treeview gets cut off there. For those of you that have 132 generations in your tree, that limitation will most likely get fixed when I switch to the Virtual Treeview component.

That Royal file only has about 5,000 people, but because of their interconnections the countancestors and countdescendants routines had to count over 5 million people in total. By eliminating countdescendants, I get rid of half that processing. And by not counting the ancestors and only doing what’s needed for autoorganize and checking for ancestral loops, the other half is sped up a bit.

It’s too bad there wasn’t a need for the counts of ancestors and descendants anywhere. The procedure to count them was quite interesting. You had to make sure you didn’t count anyone twice. And eventually in connected trees, especially for royalty, the trees join back on themselves very often as a result of cousins marrying cousins.