SOFTplus GSiteCrawler is a Space Hog
John H. Gohde came across this interesting post the other day on SOFTplus GSiteCrawler. It is really astounding that this simple program turned out to be nothing but a gigantic space hog. Webmasters need to be warned about the downside of using the SOFTplus GSiteCrawler sitemap generator freeware program.
SOFTplus GSiteCrawler version 1.23 is a sitemap generator freeware program that was written by John Mu / Johannes Mueller who is supposed to be a programming wizard, that is now working for Google.
SOFTplus GSiteCrawler – Bad Programming Design
It does seem rather odd to John, why such a simple program would have to take up so much hard disk space. It manages to be bigger than some major software packages, like Microsoft Office and major graphics programs. So astoundingly big in fact, that picking over its size is hardly a minor point. Xenu’s Link Sleuth which is a comparable website crawling program takes up only 1.43 MB. The SOFTplus GSiteCrawler program must be using just a plain bad program design. Why else would it need to use such a gigantic Microsoft Access file called GSiteCrawler-Queue.mdb which takes up a whopping 0.67 Gigabytes on his hard disk?
John was able to load the database file into Microsoft Access 97. Quite frankly, this database file looked to him like it was completely empty. As a DOS programmer, John H. Gohde’s preference was to always write to disk. It struck him that John Mu must have been writing to disk rather than to ram, which is customary. If the database is left empty? Then the program at the very least should be creating and then deleting it each time that the program is being executed.
SOFTplus GSiteCrawler – Manually Compacting Databases is Recommended
To prove his point, John H. Gohde compacted GSiteCrawler-Queue.mdb with Microsoft Access 97 which reduced the file down to a few hundred kilobytes. Then he ran the sitemap generator on this blog of his. GSiteCrawler worked just fine. The database ended up growing to just 2,360 KB. So, John would like to ask Johannes Mueller why he wasn’t smart enough to compact his database files after generating each sitemap, if he is such a great programming wizard?
On his simple blog for simpletons, John recommended dumping SOFTplus GSiteCrawler entirely. On this programming blog, he is recommending the technically inclined to compact this database file periodically with a copy of Microsoft Access 97. John H. Gohde always knew that his copy of Microsoft Office 97 would come in handy, one day.
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March 21, 2009 at 8:26 am
Taking a closer look at the SOFTplus GSiteCrawler program under the File Menu there is actually an option to chose a database and to compress the database.
My gripe is that I just wanted a sitemap every now and then. That unexplained database grew to a whopping 0.67 Gigabytes on my hard drive. A good explanation as to why there is a need at all for this gigantic empty database is sorely needed to be provided by John Mu. The facts are that compressing it to nearly zero means that the stupid thing was just plain empty. I was never aware of any database, let alone it needing to be regularly compacted.
Ergo, it is just Bad Programming Design even if an option to manually compress a totally unnecessary database is in fact provided in the program. That database is totally unnecessary. And, the compression should have been done automatically, IMHO.