Re: Erase cache, clean registry in Linux
On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 11:40:38AM -0800, Kelly Clowers wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 10:42, lee <lee@yun.yagibdah.de> wrote:
> > That shouldn't be there in the first place. You end up with hundreds
> > of megabytes of totally useless thumbnails
>
> They are not useless, they keep thumbnail display times reasonable.
> I have used programs that generate thumbnails on the fly, per session
> and it is slow and annoying.
Ok, if it helps you, it's good to have them. But then, using them
should be an option, and I would want to be asked if I wanted to use
that option. Dumping an unlimited amount of files into a hidden
directory, eating up an unlimited amount of disk space without even
telling the user about it is retarded software design.
> They are needed to keep display times reasonable. All programs
> should use the same cache, and many do. If you have a favorite
> program that does not use ~/.thumbnails, you should probably
> file a bug.
How am I supposed to know which programs would use a cache and where
the cache is when they don't even tell me? These files remain
there indefinitely if I don't delete them myself, no matter if I'm
using them or not.
Why didn't they make it so that the user can specify how much disk
space can be used for thumbnails?
> However, I am not that worried about it. Disk space is abundant and
> cheap,
That isn't true. I already have two 300GB SATA disks in software
raid-1, and there are only two more SATA devices I could connect
without buying another SATA controller. One of that will be a DVD
drive, so I could connect only one more disk. But that is not an
option because I won't put data on a single disk anymore, it has to be
at least raid-1. I've seen too many disks failing in too short time
for not to use raid. --- I also can't just add another disk and change
it to raid-5 (even if I could still get one more of the same disk): I
would have to copy the data somewhere to change from raid-1 to raid-5,
but I don't have anything to copy it to.
I happened to just look at SATA controllers: There are cheap, crappy
cards and more expensive ones that are also raid controllers. I don't
want the crappy cards (The SATA disks are still slow compared to the
SCSI disks I have, and the SCSI disks are years older than the
SATAs.), so I would have to spend $270 for the 8-port raid card and
then at least $220 to get two SATA disks. You can get 1GB SATA disks
for about $100, but what's the quality of those? Are they fast and
reliable? --- On a side note, there are only so many PCI ports on the
board. Plugging many of them with SATA controllers is not the way to
go, so even if I wouldn't go for an SATA raid controller, any
additional SATA controller should support at least 8 devices. My SCSI
controller does 32 or so ...
So if you want more than 2 relatively cheap disks and a DVD drive,
you're looking at about at least $500 for the controller and two
disks. You probably don't really need that much space, but it's
questionable if it's worthwhile to buy 500GB disks for more than 1/2
the price of a 1TB disk.
That is still relatively cheap compared to what disks used to cost not
long ago. A single disk is also relatively cheap. But to have a fast,
reliable and flexible storage system giving you a lot (by todays
standards) of disk space is *not* cheap.
Backing up the data is another problem. That isn't cheap, either, and
it gets more expensive the more data you need to back up.
Imho it's better to design software so that it doesn't waste
resources. I probably haven't used 99.99% of the 350MB thumbnails in
more than two years, but now I'm supposed to spend $500+ on getting
new disks for crap like that? I don't think so. But if you want to
give me the money for it, you're welcome :)
As to setting up cron jobs to automatically delete data, I'm very
reluctant to do that. If something goes wrong, the job might delete
data I don't want it to delete. Something as simple as filenames
containing spaces can already make it go horribly wrong.
--
"Don't let them, daddy. Don't let the stars run down."
http://adin.dyndns.org/adin/TheLastQ.htm
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