"Upstart" overloads my .cache and stops the computer from saving and functioning properly
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I am running Xubuntu 16.04LTS on a 64 bit computer. I have a hard drive of 70GB that is regularly just about half full. A couple of months ago, I got warnings that I couldn't save anything because my hard drive was completely full. I checked Disk Usage Analyzer and it said the hard drive was indeed completely full. I saw that "Upstart" was the offender. But the next day (I did nothing--but panic) "Upstart" was gone, and the hard drive was back to half full.
Today again the warnings about not being able to save etc came. I checked the Disk Usage Analyzer (screenshot 66) and again "Upstart" was the culprit. So I went to the File Manager (screenshot 67) and a log from just today was 40.3GB. I saw that the log was a plain text document so I tried to open it with Mousepad but it just ran for ten minutes and so I eventually stopped both Mousepad and .cache in the Task Manager. Well, the computer did have a lot on it at one point today: GIMP, Libre Office Writer, Firefox. But I had shut GIMP down and everything was working properly for a while, but then, as I said, I started getting the warnings that it wouldn't save and other functionality (eg. browser tabs would crash) was affected, as well. I shut down the computer and then started it back up. That did nothing. I did Code:
sudo apt-get update Code:
sudo apt-get upgrade Oddly, though, the terminal still showed that the hard drive was full, as did the initial look (the bar graphs) of Disk Usage Analyzer. But eventually both of those things also indicated that the 40.3GB was gone. As far as I could tell the sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade got rid of the log, but that may have been coincidental. Questions: 1) Any guess as to why this is happening? 2) Any suggestions on how to stop it from happening again? 3) If it does happen again, any suggestions on how to get the hard drive space back? 4) Especially since the 40.3 GB log got removed (I didn't do it) from the .cache somehow, if this should happen again, would it be okay to just delete that 40.3GB (startxfce4.log.1) log? (.ie deleting it won't screw anything else up) Thank you! |
It was co-incidental. Log rotation is compressing it and resetting the file - logs compress well.
It logs get huge, find out why. Check the log before it gets out of hand - a simple "tail -n 15" should get you some evidence. Basic "Diagnostics 101". |
startxfce4.log - 40.3GB
you should definitely find out what's going on there. log files log errors. big log files == many errors. :( |
Try reading some of that log file with the head or tail commands and post it here.
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I learned about Glogg and got it from Synaptic, so I'm able to look at the current log, but I'm not really sure what I'm looking for. Just a ton of error messages? (In today's, very small, log it was just various error messages. It seemed none had corresponding sizes attached to them.) |
Check one of the gz files - that's where the previous data is. Just zcat it and pipe to tail.
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zcat /home/${USER}/.cache/upstart/startxfce4.log.1.gz | tail -n 15 That will dump the last 15 lines to stdout - could of course be redirected to a file if desired. |
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Thanks everybody. Now I can keep an eye on that big log file with the head and tail -n 15. Hopefully I can see what's causing the sudden growth.
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