Blinking tray icon shows free space down to zero..a bug?

[MochiMoppel]

I'm using Slacko 5.6, but the problem is the same in other versions I tested:
When files are added to the pupsave file, the little green tray icon turns yellow and eventually red. The free space in the personal storage is down to a few MB. After deleting files the icon can be brought back to green and tooltip will show the increased free space.

Things turn sour when the free space hits the bottom: With free space down to zero the icon blinks, and no matter how many files I delete, the icon will not recover. BK mentioned in one of his posts that the way to recover from this state is to reboot - which in the past I obediently did. But there seems to be a much better workaround: I can simply kill the tray applet and restart it (/root/Startup/freememapplet_tray). This will again show the correct icon color and the correct free space. Apparently the applet stops to scan the free space size after hitting zero. Smells like a bug. I find this annoying and see no reason for this behaviour. Has there ever been any version which doesn't show this bug (?) and which I could use in Slacko?

[rufwoof]

MENU, Filesystem, gdmap
then click OPEN and then OPEN again

can sometimes provide a clue as to what's eating space

Move your mouse around over the larger blocks and it will show what file and the size of the file.

Often it will be something like mozilla cache or history files.

I tend to set my mozilla cache to zero under EDIT, PREFERENCES, ADVANCED, NETWORK (tick override auto cache management and set the value to zero, after first having clicked the CLEAR NOW option). But that's only ok if you've a reasonably fast internet connection - otherwise it could slow things down (having to repeatedly download things again rather than them having been cached).

[MochiMoppel]

rufwoof, thanks for your speedy feedback, but I know exactly what's eating space. My point is that the icon keeps showing zero free space even after the space eating files have been removed.

[slavvo67]

Try restarting Xserver or JWM from the start menu. Just a guess but I've seen this in other distros.

[ally]

^^ @ slavvo67

yes - confirmed working

when I do very large batch uploads to archive.org I guestimate how many I can queue in one go and often run out of space even with ~750megs free

restarting the xserver sorts it out, if it's a stream or cache issue then delete first and then restart x

[MochiMoppel]

restarting the xserver sorts it out

Restarting X is like using a bulldozer where a screwdriver would suffice
I checked Puppy 4.20. There the freemem applet doesn't look pretty, but works correctly. It even works in Slacko (freememapplet v1.2 by Lior Tubi). It probably reads /tmp/pup_event_sizefreem, a file that always contains the actual free space and obviously is ignored by the current buggy Slacko applet. Makes me wonder why pup_event_sizefreem exists at all.

To overcome the 0M bug I've now settled for an additional menu entry "Restart freemem"

Code: Select all

kill `pidof freememapplet_tray`;~/Startup/freememapplet_tray