2012-05-24 GEDSpy 0.9

Quick Look

GedSpy

GedSpy is a GEDCOM utility for Windows by Jef Aylor. It is still in beta and currently a free download.

Jeff has produced several other genealogy utilities.
Another download on the GEDSpy site is TFEUtil. TFEUtil is a utility for The Family Edge. The Family Edge is a shareware genealogy application for MS-DOS by Carl York. TFEUtil helps you clean up your sources.
GED2TPD is a GEDCOM to TreePad conversion utility. TreePad is an structured information manager by Freebyte.com, available for Windows and Linux.

gazillion

GEDSpy 0.9 has new G3 GEDCOM Parsing technology that loads files a Gazillion* times faster. That claim made me curious how fast it would handle my database of more than a quarter million individuals, so I decided to give it a spin. I had downloaded an earlier beta, but had not really tried it, and that version was expired now.

download & installation

The GEDSpy installer is a download of just a megabyte. The installer choses a reasonable default folder, and let's you change it. The GEDSpy 0.9 installer does not create a desktop icon. When I made my own desktop shortcut, I could not help but notice how ugly the GEDSpy 0.9 icon is. The current icon is clearly nothing more than a placeholder. There already is a nice looking GEDSpy logo.

starting up

The first time you start it up, GEDSpy maximises to fill the screen. That's a bit annoying, but when you resize the window, GEDSpy remembers.

GEDSpy's memory usage is almost thirty times the file size.

fan value

GEDSpy took about ten seconds to load and process FAN16.GED. That is not extremely fast, but it sure is respectable performance. Alas, that is close to the best it can do.
When I tried to load FAN20.GED, GEDSpy ran out of memory. That is not for lack of memory on my machine; it has 12 GB of RAM.

According to the Windows Task Manager, GEDSpy was already using 357 MB of RAM for FAN16.GED, a file of merely 12 MB. GEDSpy's memory usage is almost thirty times the file size. That is a lot.
GEDSpy needs about 709 MB for FAN17.GED, 1.408 MB for FAN18.GED and failed to import FAN19.GED. GEDSpy does not crash, but produces an Out of memory messagebox as soon as its memory usage approaches 2 GB.
GEDSpy's fan value is 18.

A fan value of 18 is too small to load my database. According to the GEDSpy web site, GEDSpy is designed around a powerful search engine, and can help you find relationships in your data that you never knew existed. That sounds good, and I would love to have tried it, but the simple fact of the matter is that GEDSpy is a memory-hungry 32-bit application that can't handle my database.

GEDCOM support

To be able to handle my database, a utility should have a fan value of more than 18. It should at least be 19, and probably be 20 or more, but because 18 is so close, I tried loading my database anyway, curious to see how much GEDSpy would manage.
I expected GEDSpy to run out of memory after a short while, but noticed that it did not seem to try and load the file at all. A few more tests revealed that GEDSpy's 0.9 GEDCOM support is seriously limited; it does not recognise UTF-8 GEDCOM files with a Byte Order Mark (BOM) yet.
That is not just any GEDCOM encoding. It the preferred GEDCOM encoding. It is the default GEDCOM encoding used by both older applications such as PAF 5.2.18 and modern applications such as RootsMagic 5. It is the GEDCOM encoding every GEDCOM utility should support. GEDSpy 0.9 does not support it yet.