speeding up the IDE-start through limiting the entries in preferences recent.sketches=

[StefanL38]

Today I looked up the preferences.txt-file to examine what additional switches are hidden in this file
Then I saw that the recent.sketches= -item had 70kB of entries!!

If I click on file - "open recent" the list shows ten files. Practical compromise between too much files and just three.

But why the heck does the IDE collect them all in the preference.txt-file?? Even if the 11 to 1000 entry are not accessible??
Can somebody give me a single reason why the Arduino-IDE can only work reliable with collecting all these entries?

That is what I call an old unvisible bug nobody wants to to clean up.
But this bug slows down the startup of the IDE. I guess if the line of code is found that causes this
adding the new file-entry and cut-away everything behind the tenth entry is done within 15 minutes or even less.

best regards Stefan

[magedrifaat]

While I too think solving this is trivial, I tried increasing the entry to 1MB of paths, and decreasing it to 10KB and it had no noticeable impact on the startup of the IDE at least on my machine.

[philbowles]

Well on MY machine (when some of the 65kb of paths no longer existed) it was taking anywhere between 3:30 and 7 minutes to start up. MINUTES. It needs fixing.

[magedrifaat]

@philbowles What are the specs of the machine you are running? (i.e. what OS, RAM, how full is the HDD/SSD)
Also, did you see a faster start-up time when clearing the entries? Did you confirm that this is the real cause of your slow start-up time?

[ednieuw]

Is this still an issue? Starting IDE 1.8.19 on a fast W11 PC with SSD took over 30 seconds.
Deleting most of the entries at:
c:\Users_username_\AppData\Local\Arduino15\preferences.txt
after recent.sketches=
speeded up starting significantly to 5 seconds.