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linuxmint / cinnamon-desktop

The cinnamon-desktop library (and common settings schemas for the cinnamon desktop)
GNU General Public License v2.0
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Large amounts of disk activity generated by the wallpaper slideshow #179

Open EternityForest opened 3 years ago

EternityForest commented 3 years ago 
I believe this affects all current versions and platfoms

Issue Possible excessive SSD wear caused be background slideshow mode. It appears that a ~4MB wallpaper cache file is written every single time the background auto-changes.

If this is set up for 10-second intervals, and your filesystem is such that the data actually hits the disk, this could easily create extremely large amounts of activity, if a computer were to be left on as is common for shared machines.

Combined with SSD amplification, this could potentially add up to tens of terabytes, and destroy an SSD in a few years.

Steps to reproduce

Set up a background slideshow, then look at the output of fatrace.

Expected behaviour

At least when in wallpaper slideshow mode, wallpapers, if possible, should not be cached on disk.

Perhaps the entire the ~/.cache subfolder this uses, which appears to only be used to store two image files, could be swapped out for a symlink to a /dev/shm/ folder, if the low level APIs require the caching busisness.

mtwebster commented 3 years ago

Having owned a number of ssds that I've completely abused for years while doing development, I don't agree with the your opinion on the severity of this problem - also, you can't set a 10 second change, the minimum in cinnamon is 1 minute. However I've considered starting to use /dev/shm for some other applications, and this would be an appropriate place for it as well.