(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

At the moment, my save file is set to 512M. While I know I can always increase it, what would you recommend I do to keep the Save file always in the green?

I have some customers who are interested in a simple OS. I am considering telling them about Puppy Linux. I'd like to keep it as simple and straight forward for them.

Thanks!!

There are many threads talking about how to do this.

The easiest I have found is to copy out the .mozilla folder from the /mnt/home and create a symlink back to it. Essentially that makes the firefox cache folder outside the relatively small 512mb save file.

However, whenever I've setup a puppy computer for friends, as well as doing the above, I make a big save file. I have made the past few 6gig, but have learnt since that 4 gig is ideal if you need to copy the save file. 4gig being the biggest that fits onto a fat32 flash drive!

What if you want to copy onto a 2GB flash drive?

disciple, well um, get a hammer and bash it until it fits into your flash drive. If it doesn't work right after that, go out and buy yourself a 4gig or bigger drive to replace the hammered one

It did cross my mind to increase the save file to a few gigs in size but I wasn't sure if there is a limit to the size of a save file you can have. Is there? Does it slow down the performance of puppy if you have a really large save file? I'm just wondering because if it is ok to create a large multi gig save file I will do that. The Mozilla option sounds interesting as well.

rmcellig wrote:It did cross my mind to increase the save file to a few gigs in size but I wasn't sure if there is a limit to the size of a save file you can have. Is there?

ttuuxxx wrote:The largest pupsave I've made was 35GB.

(source)

Of course it depends of filesystem on which your savefile resides.
FAT32, for instance, lets you create max. 4GB (-1 byte) large (save)file, but other filesystems like ext?/NTFS etc. have a lot larger limits.

BTW, Keep your savefile slim and healthy

Greetings!

My HD is ext4 formatted. I just increased it to 2.6 GB. All is green now so I will see how it goes.

My save file is now 4.8G. I increased the size again. It had all green bars and then went down to two orange bars . When I hover over the bars, it says I have 1.1GB of free space available.When I look at properties for the Root directory the size is only 233M. Any ideas what I should do? I'm open to anything at this point.The apps I have installed when looking at the Puppy Package manager are:

Audacity 1.3.12
Filezilla 3.3.3
IceWM 1.3.7 pre2-L519 Lucid
IceWM themes 1.2.26 Lucid
parcellite 0.9.2 i386
Chromium 20 Lucid


That's it.

My laptop memory is 2520MB (about 800MB used)

applications that download things like browsers , torrent apps etc , need the download location setting in there preferences to be outside the savefile eg. /mnt/home/downloads (will download to a folder called downloads in /mnt/home/ instead of inside the savefile).

use menu >>> filesystem >> gdmap to find what's taking up space.

chromium is particularly bad at having a huge cache. so move the hidden /root/.cache/chromium file onto the harddrive and symlink it back (same as in the dropbox thread) this moves it outside of the savefile.

you can do the same for other big files that you find with gdmap

Super! I will try that out.

Does the size of the save file depend on the size of RAM installed on my laptop? So for example if my laptop has 2.5GB of ram it makes no sense creating a save file larger than 2.5GB?

no its size isn't limited by the amount of ram. the savefile is on the harddrive and doesn't get loaded into ram.

a savefile can be any size, but smaller ones are more manageable and easier to back up.

if that is all you've installed into your puppy it really doesn't account for the amount of savefile used, so as i said in the previous post.... use 'gdmap' to find what's using all the space

Ok. Thanks!! I have been reading the page, how puppy works. Very interesting how Barry came up with all this stuff.

A thought has occurred here. Is it possible to put the browser cache completely in RAM in such a way that it doesn't burden the save file but flushes itself completely when Puppy is switched off?

Hi,

To find the culprit(s) my personal preference is the Large File Finder pet which yields a descending list of files above a chosen size in a chosen directory rather than a graphical view.

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=77779

My regards

Thanks Jasper. I will use that app on my Root directory to see if there is a culprit taking up gobs of space and post back.

Colonel Panic wrote:A thought has occurred here. Is it possible to put the browser cache completely in RAM in such a way that way it it doesn't burden the save file but flushes itself completely when Puppy is switched off?

I might be wrong, but isn't /tmp kept in RAM?
This one could be an option, too: simple GUI ramdisk script

Greetings!

Hi SFR,

Firstly, thank you very much for your excellent LargeFileFinder pet.

Then. thank you for your link just above re /mnt/ramdisk, however I don't fully understand how the ramdisk works.

I can download files to it and copy (or move) folders and filies to it and I understand they will be lost on a ramdisk unmount or a full reboot/exit.

My Linux Portable version of QtWeb browser and all its subsidiary files are stored in a folder I named QtWeb. It was easy to copy the QtWeb folder to /mnt/ramdisk and then run QtWeb from within it, but htop showed normal RAM usage - i.e. there was no saving of "standard" RAM.

My attempt to save "standard" RAM by running QtWeb portable from /mnt/ramdisk seems to be an experiment far beyond the realms of probable success. However. if you have time to hint how the /mnt/ramdisk might best be used (in addition to your cache type suggestion) that would be much appreciated.

My regards

Hey Jasper.

Hmm, I don't really know why htop doesn't want to include ramdisk in its RAM stats...perhaps because it's seen as a filesystem, not a part of actual RAM..?
To see actual size and usage of the ramdisk, I use: Also: seems to be more accurate than htop.

As for usage hints for ramdisk, it's hard to me to think of anything more than saving space on a savefile/disk by putting temporary files into it...but, for example, such a ramdisk could be useful for operations that need a lot of disk reads/writes.
Using RAM would be a lot faster in such cases...

PS. I'm glad you like LFF - thanks! &
Greetings!

I recommend treesize.