File Size Tips

[kq76]

I originally wrote this for one league in particular, but I figure it just might help a number of leagues out there who don't know much about this. Shaving off a few (and possibly tens of) MBs from a league file just might make the difference for some managers in deciding whether to stay in or leave a league so I highly recommend that commissioners at least consider some of these tips.

You can see these options by going to the commissioner portal and then clicking on the "league file settings" button. Here is the manual page on it.

To start, I see that the names.dat file is included when it's not necessary for just the update file. It is necessary for installation and maybe at the beginning of a season, but not otherwise. Similarly, retired is only necessary at installation and at the end of the season. Both of these files are wholly unnecessary for people who are not first installing the game so I'd definitely leave both out. Just make an extra file of those two (or all dats) for people to use to (re-)install the league when needed.

Now for the past X days stuff. I'd have to look at the file in more detail than I care to to see how many days you have it set at so maybe you could just look at your settings. Unfortunately with these it's beneficial to include the past couple of sims as well for those who have missed a couple sims in a row and with the ____'s bi-weekly sims it's unfortunately twice as much, but you could decide some of these are more important than others and set them each to a different amount of days. For example, messages IMO are probably the most important. Meanwhile, replays can be fun to watch, but if no one's really watching them then you could easily save a fair chunk of space by excluding them (there should even be a way somewhere to disable them from ever being made, but you might want to keep them at least for the playoffs). Game logs and box scores are probably somewhere in-between in importance to people. Anyway, in the ___ _____ sets each at 21 days (that's 3 sims for us), but I figure you could probably get away with 28 days for the boxscores and game logs, 42 for messages, and either 14 or even 0 for replays (2, 3, and 1 or 0 sims, respectively).

I'd definitely uncheck the images checkbox if you haven't already. Uploading these once a year in a separate file should be plenty good enough.

Finally, the rest. Well, I think you might want to check all the majors stuff, but you could decide that only some or even none of the minor league news is important enough to include. It appears these settings are just for the text files which are much smaller than the html files (the game creates the htmls when necessary from the text files) so leaving them out might not decrease the file size by much, but you can test to see if even they're worth it to you or not. Either way, I wouldn't feel too bad about leaving at least some of them out considering the following point that the manual makes:

Anyone have any other file size tips or corrections to the above?

[Bluenoser]

I'll add one thing to this - if you don't include the names.dat file you're asking for trouble. I've been in a number of leagues where, if that file wasn't included, it messed up the players in game. You'd click on the link (player name) for Joe Smith and the page that opened was for Jim Brown. Plus, there would be players on your team you never heard of, and guys missing that could never be found again.

My recommendation is to always include it. Usually it's not much more than few MB's anyway.