Topic created on: June 24, 2011 15:34 CDT by shademe .

I've been using IDA Pro for over a year now. During that period, I noticed that databases accumulated bloat over time. While IDA's 'Collect Garbage' tool worked at first, it ends up providing diminishing returns (in my testing at least).

Case in point: A database that approximately equaled to 120MB after the initial auto-analysis, has grown over 850MB over a period of ~15 months. The database saw regular use. The 'Collect Garbage' tool was used at regular intervals. It would also be prudent to note that the database was infrequently saved during debug sessions as well. At present, IDA takes over 3 minutes to load the database for use and 5 more to save it (without compression). Deflating the database does result in a modest file size reduction but also doubles the load and save duration.

My question is this: Would there be any way to prevent this from happening? Also, is there anything that can be done with the above database (in terms of file size reduction and performance)?

Thanks in advanced