willson556
commented
10 years ago From dinkypumpkin on April 15, 2013 12:23:52
A download_history file of 950MB equates to hundreds of thousands of downloads. Have you been that prolific? I'm assuming from your report that you wiped the download history file when updating to pre.8, so it seems unlikely you downloaded that much in a month. The history file must be chock full of junk that is choking get_iplayer and thus causing GiA to seize up. The history file is loaded inside get_iplayer when it starts up, so the process is outside GiA's control.
You may have been hit by an extreme version of the problem reported in issue #180 . If you can, look for big blocks of repeated characters and see if they correspond to entries with accented characters in the programme title, or some other pattern. If you find anything like that, try to cut a few example entries into another file and post it so I can have a look. I couldn't reproduce the problem in issue #180 , and I still can't, either with GiA or get_iplayer alone. It would seem there may something screwy with get_iplayer that puts junk into the download history under some circumstances, but the problem needs to be isolated, so post any clues you may find.
For now, see if you can back up your history file and then edit it down to the past month or two of valid entries. It might be unwieldy to do in an editor, but you you can try the tail utility to extract however many lines you need from the end of the file. If that works, it should save some work in repopulating the history via "Permanently Skip..." for series-link entries already downloaded.
More generally, there is no need to keep items in the download history if they are no longer available for download or no longer part of your PVR list, so it's a good idea to give it a haircut every month if you're a heavy downloader. Unfortunately, get_iplayer doesn't provide a mechanism to trim the download history, so you'll have to do it in the GiA history editor (or edit the file directly).
From dar...@ingram.fi on April 11, 2013 10:21:57
What steps will reproduce the problem? In upgrading in the past to various -pre packages, including today from pre8 to pre10 (or pre8 to pre9) on fully-upgraded OSX10.8.3 the app crashes on start "not responding" before it even opens the GUI.
It appears from experimentation to be possibly related to the download history. Copy back download history and the app will not load. Delete and let it rebuild and it will load. Then copy back and it is back to not loading.
Other files seem not affected, such as copying back Queue.automatorqueue which returns the PVR queue.
It would be rather nice to not have to trash the download history all of the time! Whether it would be possible to have the app first "open" and then show each file loading, so if it gets stuck on a corrupt or unhappy file, it might show this more clearly to a user (even with option to isolate/delete troublesome file for those who don't mind wandering through /Application Support?
I can provide a copy of the download history file if this helps, but have not so far as it was unclear if there was any "private information" embedded. A quick skim in textpad didn't reveal anything. File size is c 950mb.
Original issue: http://code.google.com/p/get-iplayer-automator/issues/detail?id=195