A file with a thousand people is usually under a megabyte. A file with a hundred thousand people can be a hundred megabytes. Both are normal.

What makes a file big

Not the people. A person with a name and three facts is a few hundred bytes. Ten thousand of them is a couple of megabytes.

  • Notes and transcriptions. Pasting the full text of every census page and will into the file adds up quickly. A file with detailed source text can be ten times the size of the same tree without it.
  • Sources. Some programs write one source per record instance rather than one per collection, so a well-cited tree can have as many source records as people.
  • Merged imports. A file that has been through several programs and several merges collects duplicate sources, unused records and dangling references. None of it hurts, but it all takes space.

Media references do not add much. They are one line each; the images themselves are not in the file.

What "slow" means

GED-VIEW reads the whole file, builds the family structure in memory, and indexes it for search. On a laptop, ten thousand people take about a second; a hundred thousand take several seconds. That is parsing, and it happens once when the file is opened.

After that, individual pages are fast, with a couple of exceptions. Views that draw one thing per person, like the Events list or a descendants chart of the earliest ancestor, would freeze the browser on a very large file if they drew everything at once. So they draw a first batch and offer more on request.

If a very large file seems to hang while opening, give it a minute before deciding it has failed. If it really has failed, the support form under Help is the place to say so; the file size and the program that made it are the useful details.

Making a file smaller

Usually unnecessary. If wanted, the tools are in the program that made the file: export without notes, or without sources, or only a branch. The export guides cover the options.

Next

If the file opens, it is fine. If it does not, the "won't open" checklist is the next stop.