My macro library sync file is 99M. This seems huge. I am also experiencing frequent spinning beach balls as I work within the KM editor. Is the size of the sync library a problem?
Your macro sync file is basically the same size as the macro library.
And the macro library is written in its entirety for every change you make to your macros (technically, there is some coalescing of changes, but essentially this is true). And so a 99MB macro file will lead to performance issues.
Generally it is images that are the issue - storing images directly in your macros will bloat them considerably, and wherever possible you should store images outside of your macros (including in Named Clipboards if desired). The down side of this is that they will not be synced with macro syncing (which is an unavoidable problem really, either the large images files are synced or they aren't).
Other things can be large, like styled text, or just large amounts of text, but generally it is images that are the issue.
Thanks, Peter. I had been storing images, so that must be the problem.
If you select Help ➤ Open Preferences Folder, you can see the Keyboard Maestro Macros.plist file, and its size. Then as you remove whatever large images are in there, you can see the affect on the size of the file.
If you are macro syncing, you can also watch the sync file, which will adjust in size more or less at the same time.
It's silly, but I had a bunch of string triggers that would output a small image, typically a reaction shot to convey some snide sentiment in a message thread. But it blew up the memory. I took them out and the file went back down to 10MB.
Thanks again.
@peternlewis, IIRC, at one time you were storing all images as TIFF, which is very large compared to PNG, even when the source image was PNG. Is this still the case? If so, maybe that is what is causing the Macro file bloat.
I had about 150 image triggers, none were TIFFs. Most were JPEG, some were PNG, and some large GIFs. I've learned my lesson. I recreated them using HTML links, which can be directly slotted into outgoing Postbox messages.
All images that Keyboard Maestro stores in the macros are stored internally as compressed TIFFs.
TIFFs can be larger than PNGs, but it my tests it was worst case abut twice the size, and generally not that much (this is for large images, it obviously doesn't make much difference for small images unless you have a very large number of them).
In any event, that is by far the easiest way to store the images since it is provided by the system API, so that is not likely to change.