GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 141073
No limit on thumbnail cache - big disk space waste
Last modified: 2008-04-04 19:22:13 UTC
This bug was reported in the Debian BTS : http://bugs.debian.org/235067 "Nautilus generates preview icons, but it does not erase icons for deleted files or age out old icons to limit cache size. This adds up fast -- I found that my thumbnail directory was eating nearly 2gig space. (Our project includes many texture maps with a build revision built into all names - that means thousands of new file names with each nightly build.) My local fix is a nightly cron job that erases thumbnail files over a week old, but this should really be done by Nautilus. Limiting by total size, file date, or even an option to purge all thumbnails on shutdown/startup would be ideal."
*** Bug 149668 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Maybe if the disk usage of the cache dir exceeds a particular limit (settable through gconf), a dialog should pop up asking you whether you want to delete all cache files, or defer deletion until the space exceeds current_limit + n bytes where n is reasonably calculated (probably through some mod magic). You can use GConf to set it to 0 as well, meaning that you don't want any thumbnailing limit. regs, Chris
*** Bug 151216 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
"150483: No UI for deleting thumbnails, which never go away on their own" has a patch, could fix this bug too (not sure if we just want an UI, or also a limit and an autoclean system) ...
I think that it would be Gnomish to "just work" and that would mean an autocleaner based on a percentage of the partition users home is on or of his quote there.
Would be also nice if the failed directory would be removed say every 3 months. A user then might have updated his thumbnailer software and that software then maybe is able to thumbnail files it could not thumbnail before. I had this issue for a while with the totem thumbnailer which was broken for a while.
See bug 304184 for a patch that would reduce the impact of this a bit.
*** Bug 335776 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
There should be a sensible default maximum size for the thumbnail cache, which shrinks when disk space or quota used gets too close to the limit. When it reaches that limit, a LRU expiry algorithm would probably be the sensible behaviour.
Created attachment 85971 [details] another crasher (eler ep065 :)
(In reply to comment #10) > Created an attachment (id=85971) [edit] > another crasher (eler ep065 :) > sorry, attached this to the wrong bug report. ignore. Too many gnome bugzilla tabs open at once!
It seems work on this is going on in gnome-settings-daemon (bug #523159), so I'm marking this as depending on the g-s-d bug.
Closing as fixed. gnome-settings-daemon will purge the thumbnail cache when items are older than 60 days, or the cache exceeds 64 MB, by default. Will appear in Gnome 2.24. - Mike
awwwesome. Someone need to give a per-release award for 'oldest bug fixed in this release'... thanks :)
I'm hoping someone will fix bug 80925, so don't give out any awards yet... - Mike