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[coalboat]

All three of my caverns are re-animating and the corpses are rolling all over the place more and more, including jabberers, cave crocodiles, and various forgotten beasts. To make it worse, every severed head and hand counts as a separate entry on that list.

I remember that the death list has bad effects on the game. My save is already 70MB. Does the save size simply go up or does it eventually reach a certain equilibrium? I have many plans for this fort but if the save goes over 200MB I probably will have to abandon it.

[Uthimienure]

I can't comment about if the save size will decrease because I didn't pay attention to before/after (mine is 425MB after 22 years with population 297 in a 5x5 with 1st & 2nd caves explored), this might be of interest if you don't already use it:

In DFHack, run:
fix/dead-units
Removes uninteresting dead units from the unit list. Doesn’t seem to give any noticeable performance gain, but migrants normally stop if the unit list grows to around 3000 units, and this script reduces it back.

(edit: had 41MB but that was zipped)

[Saiko Kila]

Save may also shrink - size of my save recently slightly decreased after I dropped over two hundred enemies into magma flow. Still, usually it goes up.  My save went from ~62 MiB on year 1, to 85 MiB on year 10, to ~92 MiB on year 15, for example, but I don't have 3000 dead yet (total units including dead is about 2800). Size of savefile depends first on size of the world. For this reason I prefer medium words at most, or smaller.

I would care more about performance than savesize, and less items (and critters) should help with that. How many frames per second on average you get? In my experience the FPS death comes before savefile is too big, but of course that may be different for bigger worlds.

[coalboat]

425MB is really a huge save. I set my pop cap at 100, and the embark is 4x4. I hope I can keep it under 200MB by year 20. I didn't know that dead unit list affects migrants. I'll try that when I need more migrants.

I cap FPS at 20 and so far it never goes lower than that. I used the default settings when I genned the world, not sure how big the world is.

edit:
I have yearly back up and I delete the old ones when a year passes. I think I read somewhere that frequently creating and deleting large files can damage the hard drive. Is that true?

[Mobbstar]

I have yearly back up and I delete the old ones when a year passes. I think I read somewhere that frequently creating and deleting large files can damage the hard drive. Is that true?

Depending on the filesystem, "deleting" might simply mean "allow other files to overwrite the space".  In any case, a few hundred filewrites shouldn't damage your drive noticably.  That's more something to keep in mind when writing and deleting files 24/7 in a server program.

[Uthimienure]

425MB is really a huge save. ...

In init.txt
[COMPRESSED_SAVES:NO]

[coalboat]

In any case, a few hundred filewrites shouldn't damage your drive noticably.  That's more something to keep in mind when writing and deleting files 24/7 in a server program.

That's good to hear.

[COMPRESSED_SAVES:NO]

My setting is YES. I'll check how much it is uncompressed tomorrow.