Hi,

I have been using JBidwatcher for years, and I have often archived the auctions.xml back in time (still got them all probably!) because JBidwatcher always seemed to take too much memory and run too slow as I add more and more auctions. While doing this I used to then delete the auctions in my “Completed” auctions (and kept the ones in tab like “Won”). I suspect it is taking so much memory because it is loading all the auctions at the runtime (and maybe your “objects” are taking lot of memory, Morgan probably have an idea of the capacity of the program and the reason why it is so memory hungry). It is also going over 512MB on my box (I could probably force the java VM to allow more, if that is a limit and it would probably avoid some problem I am often experiencing, I suppose because it behave wrongly when it is taking so much resources).

I am a collector and I often add hundred of auctions each weeks, and I also have an archiver mindset, and I like to keep my archive! It is useful to check how much something was sold for in the past, how much I decided to bid/snipe, etc. (even thought JBidwatcher sometime seem to lose sniping info, but that is another story).

I used also to put at the same place (category/tab) everything I was winning, but I do not do this anymore with JBidwatcher because going in the “completed” tab was a nigthmare, i.e., it is taking way too much time. That broken my “good habits” at some point.

I do not like to “purge” everything (JBidwatcher could do a good job of archiving and even let me search the archive) and I would prefer another option.

Still… I am probably gonna do this somewhere this week (unless I get another recommendation for archiving without just doing a backup). I am not even sure deleting through the interface will be an “easy” and “fast” task.

Maybe there could also be a kind of “archived” auctions that won’t load on startup (I know that you load only the “active” auctions at first to speed thing up, so it is probably something that could be easily implemented).

I noticed that there is an “archived_auctions” table in the database (that is similar to “auctions”, except some fields), which hinted me that maybe you already thought about such problems.

My first idea would simply be to only load active auctions (or to allow us to “archive” auctions, without deleting). If we ever want to make an auction non-archived, then we can have a small interface to query the database and change the “flag”). But I have not think much about it. Do you have any suggestion Morgan?

You also talked about “entries” in another thread, so maybe auction and entries are different thing, feel free to educate me on them too.

Thanks

P.S. Might be also fun to load the whole old archive from XML, but that is beyond practical purpose to create a merger for everything even if the archiver in me would like it! I have not been mad enough to create one myself, so… eh

P.P.S. I am also a developer, and I am at ease doing technical stuff like going to the database and do some manipulation, etc. And if you do not have any other suggestions than delete completed auctions for now… then I can probably suggest something more advanced to manage archive and help the runtime memory, etc. usage as a side effect.

I’ve also wanted to save past auctions for pricing history, although I also wanted to save all the auction images from the auction, but jbidwatcher just has the thumbnail image.
I’d be happy if I could find some other tool which did this for me; I would just then drag each auction to JBW and this 2nd toool. Sometimes I search completed auctions and find something interesting which I want to save off. But I haven’t found any other tool which does what I want.

What I do know for auctions which I really want to save, is I use firefox to save the entire page + images in a MAFF file. BUt that is kind of a hassle, and I don’t bother for most auctions. I can use the windows filename search box to search the MAFF files, but it won’t search the keywords that were on the auction page.

JBW kind of sucks for viewing completed auctions because they don’t have a good search function.

If anyone has a better tool for archiving 100s of auctions and making them easy to search on later, let me know.

Thanks