Question about winamp.ini file

[Aminifu]

Hi dro,

I have been using WACUP since 2017. I have sections in my winamp.ini file for plug-ins I no longer use and have deleted or disabled loading. There are also sections for plug-ins I've never used and have disabled loading. Some of these sections have several lines. Should I delete these sections to prevent wasting caching space on unnecessary stuff?

I have noticed that the [Winamp] section has grown quite large. I'm starting to wonder if everything in it is still necessary and if one or more old obscure setting is contributing to issues you have not been able to replicate.

Unlike the studio.xnf file, I know of no easy and safe way to purge the winamp.ini file and let it be rebuilt with just stuff necessary for a particular configuration.

[dro]

If the file is under 64KB in size then Windows will generally be fine with it as that's a limitation the OS provided apis used on ini files can have. I can't remember exactly what problems would occur but wacup's settings cache handling (have a vague memory you might've disabled that) works around that size issue on loading since it uses it's own handling to get things loaded into the cache & then it doesn't need to mess around with the file but that could then potentially mean it's wasting a few 10s of KB of memory due to what's there vs what's been cached in memory.

The ini file being smaller can be useful to avoid wasting memory & for a small performance adjustment in reducing the time to load / save the file. Since it's just a text file then it's simple enough to remove sections that aren't wanted now as long as you know what they're related to (as a few plug-ins sometimes look at the sections of other plug-ins but that's not too common) which would then force things back to their default reading options if the plug-in is still enabled.

A complete purging of values already at their defaults isn't something I'd want to implement as there's just too many options from the core & spread out over the plug-ins. I do however try to avoid saving out default values to avoid the file getting too large but that doesn't help if the file already has those stored (maybe I could do something with the read handling to try to work around it but that also assumes the code caller is providing a valid default & not a faux one which can be done to detect removed vs intentionally empty string values).

However settings that aren't used shouldn't make a difference if they're present in the file & is only a potential problem if something is trying to actually read the option to make use of it. I think more of your issues is something else is still corrupting the process memory as can occur with using modern skins rather than it being the config file itself but a smaller winamp.ini file generally shouldn't make things worse unless you remove an entry for something that you actually wanted to be changed from the wacup default for it.

[Aminifu]

Ok, I will stop worrying about the winamp.ini file. Mine is only 14KB and deleting things has a better chance of hurting something than helping anything.

I am using the settings cache option on the preferences advanced page 1. The note to disable if 3rd party plug-ins don't work properly gave me pause, but I enabled it anyway. All plug-ins listed with the WACUP icon, I no longer consider to be 3rd party, even if they started out that way.

[dro]

Usually you can probably work out what the sections might relate to which makes removing them a bit easier & if in doubt I can have a look at the file or what sections might relate to what otherwise it likely doesn't make much sense to mess with it when it's otherwise ok. I'd expect a file to be a few KB but with other plug-ins &/or changing the settings including more atf strings would make it grow so I'm not concerned by the file size & it's well below the OS limits so there's nothing to worry about that being a potential issue behind things going wonky.