Do I have to worry about the registerVariable() you are storing data with more than 2KB warning?

Question

I am working on an experiment where we need to schedule the appearances of many words over a sequence of about 10 days. In order to do this, at the beginning of the experiment, we build a schedule for each day that consists of randomly sampling 20 words. We store additional string and integer information as well as the order of appearance of the words. When we use the registerVariable() function to make the schedule available throughout the survey, we get the following warning:

"You are storing data (%schedule%) with more than 2 KB in the interview case. Please consider using the show() command instead of replace() for large placeholders."

I can see how my data structure could be further compressed by changing the human-readable keys from strings to integers, as well as only storing indices into a words list, instead of the words themselves. However, as far as I know, SoSci Survey does not permit PhP classes, and using string keys makes the code a lot more readable.

Do I have to worry about the warning that registerVariable() is producing? If I do, what are the consequences, and how might I mitigate them?

Answer 1

This warning formemost tells you, that you're using SoSci Survey outside of how it is commonly used. If you have a good reason for that ... ignore the warning.

The hard limit is 32 KB per variable, and 64 KB per case (for all variables). So, 2 KB is uncommonly much, but won't cause any issues.

SoSci Survey does not permit PhP classes

But it allows for "PHP functions" in the respective tab.

If you actually ran into isues with too much storage per interview, the database for contents would allow for possible solutions as well. However, well, probably no need for that at the moment.