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Monitor your UPF file

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Original Tip Date: Nov. 25, 2003

Monitor your UPF file
 
While watching a rerun of "The Flinstones", Barry Bentley overheard Fred telling Barney that you can monitor your UPF file in V8.5 by setting MS_MONITOR_USER_PREFS = 1.

This variable causes several tests to be activated, including watching for MDL applications that improperly use the UPF file.

Updated 2004-10-01:
Bentley's Back Door Answer Man, Sam Wilson adds this:

"In V8.5.1 the MS_MONITOR_USER_PREFS configuration variable is set to 1 by default, but you can easily set it to 0 to turn the monitoring off.

So, what does "monitoring" mean? Well, if MS_MONITOR_USER_PREFS is set, MicroStation 8.5.1 tries to detect when an application opens the user preferece file and then forgets to close it.

Why is it a big deal if an application leaves the user preference file open? MicroStation tries to make writing to a resource file as fast as possible, while also making the file as small as possible. In order to do both, MicroStation defers some clean-up tasks until the file is closed. If the file is not closed, this clean-up is not done, leaving wasted space in the file. This leaves the resource file larger than it needs to be, although it does not actually corrupt it.

When MS_MONITOR_USER_PREFS is set, MicroStation 8.5.1 doesn't just detect when an application has left the user preference file open, but it also remedies the problem by closing the UPF automatically. This gives the system the chance it needs to prevent the accumulation of wasted space in the user preference file.

If, for some reason, the UPF file was not closed properly in a previous session, then MicroStation will do the clean-up after the fact, squeezing the wasted space out of it. MicroStation only does this if the MS_COMPRESS_USER_PREFS variable is set and if the file is larger than 500K. The file size threshold is based on the theory that a smaller file is not likely to contain wasted space, while a larger file is suspicious."

Related Tip:
Compress Your UPF File

 

AskInga Tip #363

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