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Very large disk read and write statistics
Status:
RESOLVED: INVALID
Product:
Xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin
Component:
General

Comments

Description mberg2007 2020-01-08 15:01:49 CET
Created attachment 9358 
Screenshot from my task manager

This may not be a bug but I can't find any support forum that discusses this subject.

I want to report what appears to me as a problem regarding disk i/o by the whisker menu plugin.

As you can see in the attached screenshot, the whisker menu plugin has currently read and written nearly 14 gb of data on my disk so far. For a plugin that simply shows a menu of things for me to choose from, this just doesn't seem right. Especially the write numbers - why has the plugin written 14 gb of data to my disk?

Does anyone have a clue why this could be happening? Is anyone else experiencing the same kind of problem?

Again I'm not sure this is really a bug but it is a behaviour that gives me some cause for concern. If this truly reflects disk usage then it could adversely affect my SSD in the long run.
Comment 1 Graeme Gott editbugs 2020-01-08 15:42:53 CET
That is incredibly bizarre and I have no absolutely no idea how that it is happening. How long has Whisker Menu been running? It does write its settings to disk when you close it, but that is a tiny file of only a couple kilobytes.
Comment 2 Graeme Gott editbugs 2020-01-08 16:09:13 CET
A quick test where I disable icons and reading and writing of the settings still shows disk read and write when I launch a program. I think GNOME system monitor is counting all disk access of launched programs as part of Whisker Menu, because when I turn on the dependency graph I can see it inflate the disk usage numbers by the exact amounts of the launched programs when I quit them. That is not an accurate reflection of disk usage of just Whisker Menu.
Comment 3 mberg2007 2020-01-09 09:52:34 CET
$ uptime
09:43:21 up 23 days, 23:22,  1 user,  load average: 0.92, 1.22, 1.27

So I have left my pc running for some time, and being a software developer I use tools that operate on very large projects with thousands of large files. If disk usage by applications launched from the Whisker Menu plugin count as disk usage by the plugin itself, this would explain a lot.

I just tried launching Eclipse, working a bit with it and then exiting - while watching disk read/write totals in the system monitor. It did go up by a few hundred megabytes when I exited Eclipse. So your assumption is probably correct.

I have no problems with this as it appears to be simply something of an accounting error. It would probably be useful if this could somehow be changed, perhaps by modifying the way whisker menu actually launches applications.

Thanks for looking into this!

Bug #16353

Reported by:
mberg2007
Reported on: 2020-01-08
Last modified on: 2020-01-09

People

Assignee:
Graeme Gott
CC List:
0 users

Version

Attachments

Screenshot from my task manager (45.04 KB, image/png)
2020-01-08 15:01 CET , mberg2007
no flags

Additional information