by Magno Urbano

During the last years I am tired of being part in several beta testing programs, including Adobe and Macromedia (RIP), and always complaining about the same thing: applications are unecessarrily and excessively big. Dealing with software programming for decades, I know that virtually all software presently are still using legacy techniques of loading all the software in memory when the software is run, instead of loading just the structure and loading each command on demand.

Beyond the FTP module that never worked fine, Deeamweaver is the best candidate I have for how to create a big and sluggish application.

Fed of complaing, I decided to explore Dreamweaver folders and trim some crap. After finishing, I know have a version of Dreamweaver that has a reduced memory footprint (from 56  to 41 megabytes) and loads in 6 seconds (on a first generation MacMini), compared to 30 seconds before trimming.

To me, the point in Dreamweaver diet is to trim everything that is useless to me. For instance, everything related to ColdFusion, ASP and JRUN.

Before start trimming Dreamweaver I recomend a full backup of your data.

After that, here we go.

1) Create a copy of the Dreamweaver folder.
2) Open that folder and type on the search box on the right upper corner, words that can  be related to what you want to dump. As soon as the search results come, select everything you can find - specially the JSP files - that might be related to the case.

In my case, I needed to dump everything about ColdFusion, ASP and JRUN, so, I made 3 searches: one for CF, other for ASP and a third for JRUN.

You can search for whatever you want, as SPRY, for example.

Delete everything you think is related. It is a kind of experience, but as you are working on a copy of Dreamweaver you will have no problem.

After the diet, the only problem I have is two warning windows I have when DW starts: the first tells me that Dreamweaver folder was changed and asks if I want to fix the settings. ALWAYS ANSWER CANCEL to that window.

The second warning is about a function that Dreamweaver is not finding during startup.

Beyond that, the program is stable and works fast.

Compared to Dreamweaver before trimming, I suppose my copy is twice as fast.

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