Garbage collection of unused grid component

[chmerdon]

Meanwhile the components dictionary in an ExtendableGrid accumulates all kind of adjacency and may contain redundant information that can be recalculated again from the main adjacencies (like NodeCells, but also FaceNodes etc.). We may think of some "garbage collecting" mechanism that checks if a component is still needed and erases it otherwise.

[pjaap]

You mean something like trim_components!(grid) to delete the transposed adjacency infos? I this even measurable in terms of RAM usage?

[chmerdon]

Yes something like that. Maybe it is not measurable in the RAM, but this aims more on reducing the file size when you want to store the grid I guess.

[pjaap]

In that case, we can implement a save(grid, filename) in, e.g., JLD2 format without any precomputed data fields. Or maybe a with a flag save(grid, filename, store_foo = false) to toggle this property.
I do not see a use case for trimming the grid components as a user at runtime.

[chmerdon]

Ok, that sounds like a good idea. Such a save function seems to be missing anyways. Maybe the user can give a list with the (keys to the) components he wants to keep and the default is all.