Delphi: storing data in classes vs records, memory usage reduction

Question

I have quite a lot of data to store, read and modify in memory while the application works. The data could be compared to a tree, where each node is described by limited num

Answer 1

Compared to the vast majority of IDEs, a memory increase for loading all of the PHP5 meta data of only 10 megabyte is actually pretty good.

If it is really worth the effort for you, I'd start with string literal merging.

Make all the strings go in a global table (or dictionary), and point to that from all your strings.

You can take this a step further, since the PHP 5 language and libraries are pretty static: convert your whole data structure from dynamic into static constants (using records), and all the indexes enumeration types.

What you might be able to do is make all your strings resourcestrings or string constants, and see if the Delphi compiler can do the literal merging for you.

I just noticed that you also load the documentation for all of the PHP5 stuff. That accounts for quite a bit of memory. You might want to load those into compressed streams.