.xsession-errors @ 163GiB ???

[motoburn]

my desktop threw me a "Disk space running low" warning tonight... so i went digging to find out how in the world... all my media is stored on an external firewire drive, and my /root has a 40GiB partition while my /home has the remaining 190GiB +/-

I finally found the file .xsession-errors which I assume is an error log. I am unable to open it to view the log due to the shear size of it. I checked my space last night while making room.

a) What on earth caused a 163 gig plain text file since last night?

b) Can I just rm that file without damaging anything?

not sure what to do about it


EDIT: Nevermind... I went ahead and did an rm on it. had to reboot... apparently, a fresh one was created, I will keep an eye on it to see if some wierd stuff is hitting it...

[Snowhog]

Re: .xsession-errors @ 163GiB

How long had it been since your last logout/reboot of your system?

[motoburn]

Re: .xsession-errors @ 163GiB

idk, a week... i think

[oshunluvr]

Re: .xsession-errors @ 163GiB

too bad you deleted it - mine's been up for 7 days and my .xsession-errors is about 672k.

I'd keep an eye one it and see if it starts to grow. If it does next time - post a little bit of it and let's see if we can fix it!

[GreyGeek]

Re: .xsession-errors @ 163GiB

Use Kdebugdialog to control what goes into .xsession-errors. In it you will see that the KDE developers have made provisions for EVERY action by the KDE desktop and EVERY KDE program to post messages (not necessarily error or even warning messages). You can disable all of them, like I have, or you can leave certain ones on. If I have have problems with my desktop or certain programs I can turn on their reporting in kdebugdialog.

I found that 99.99% of the lines in my program .xsession-errors file were written there by Akonadi and nepomuck actions (not necessarily errors).

IF you delete .xsessions-errors then recreate it using the CLI command:
touch .xsession-errors

Some folks may have trouble logging back into the KDE desktop if they just delete that file.

[toad]

Re: .xsession-errors @ 163GiB

@ motoburn

That is positively huge! My file has got 11MB and is 18 months old - I was shocked to see it was that large. Yours, however, defies description! At your rate it writes more than 20gb a day, adding stuff faster than it is possible to read.

Fasten your seat belt and type:

tail -f .xsession-errors

Time to learn to speed read You should now see the output written to your .xsession-errors flashing past the terminal. To stop this garbage press CTRL+C.

If you want to filter certain aspects only use grep such as

tail -f .xsession-errors | grep error

to only display lines containing the word error. You get the gist.

@GG
Kdebugdialog is cool! Never seen that one before

[motoburn]

Re: .xsession-errors @ 163GiB

too bad you deleted it - mine's been up for 7 days and my .xsession-errors is about 672k.

I'd keep an eye one it and see if it starts to grow. If it does next time - post a little bit of it and let's see if we can fix it!

absolutely will do. I had hoped to pinpoint the cause last night, but nothing I tried could even open the file. it must have been too large.

Use Kdebugdialog to control what goes into .xsession-errors. In it you will see that the KDE developers have made provisions for EVERY action by the KDE desktop and EVERY KDE program to post messages (not necessarily error or even warning messages). You can disable all of them, like I have, or you can leave certain ones on. If I have have problems with my desktop or certain programs I can turn on their reporting in kdebugdialog.

I found that 99.99% of the lines in my program .xsession-errors file were written there by Akonadi and nepomuck actions (not necessarily errors).

IF you delete .xsessions-errors then recreate it using the CLI command:
touch .xsession-errors

Some folks may have trouble logging back into the KDE desktop if they just delete that file.

I see, well fortunately, it just recreated the file on login. I will check the Kdebugdialog when I get home. Thanks for the tip

@ motoburn

That is positively huge! My file has got 11MB and is 18 months old - I was shocked to see it was that large. Yours, however, defies description! At your rate it writes more than 20gb a day, adding stuff faster than it is possible to read.

Fasten your seat belt and type:

tail -f .xsession-errors

Time to learn to speed read You should now see the output written to your .xsession-errors flashing past the terminal. To stop this garbage press CTRL+C.

If you want to filter certain aspects only use grep such as

tail -f .xsession-errors | grep error

to only display lines containing the word error. You get the gist.

@GG
Kdebugdialog is cool! Never seen that one before

Will try this as well when I get home.


I thought the 163GiB was a bit excessive... hopefully it isnt full again when I get home

thanks for the replies

[GreyGeek]

Re: .xsession-errors @ 163GiB

If your .xsession-errors were accumulating that fast you probably have a race condition in KDE or one of the programs marked for logging by kdebugdialog. Toad's advice will help you isolate which program(s) is causing all the problems, or if there are just too many programs posting action reports. If your desktop is stable and you aren't having problems with specific apps it may be advisable to just disable reporting.

[motoburn]

Re: .xsession-errors @ 163GiB

Understood, upon further reflection (I haven't been home yet) I've been trying to recall any changes I made yesterday or any strange happenings...
That I can recall:

1)noticed in top list, a program called purity was at the top. I had added the package a few days ago out of curiosity (I suppose it was supposed to be a game... some sort of tests idk) anyway, it never would run, so I apt-get remove'd it, yet it still showed in top (this disappeared after the reboot last night but might be related to the topic at hand...)

2)after deciding that my graphics were considerably worse, and desktop effects were not working after installing the ATI 3d accelerator... I disabled the driver (this is the one I would expect caused my issues as I was not prompted to nor did I reboot after disabling the driver)

3)installed postgresql and some other related packages (doubt this had anything to do with it as I installed the same set on my laptop... i don't know that for sure though..)

I predict, I will get home and find all is well, but if not, I will spend some time getting to know the error log setup

[GreyGeek]

Re: .xsession-errors @ 163GiB

Understood, upon further reflection (I haven't been home yet) I've been trying to recall any changes I made yesterday or any strange happenings...
That I can recall:

1)noticed in top list, a program called purity was at the top. I had added the package a few days ago out of curiosity (I suppose it was supposed to be a game... some sort of tests idk) anyway, it never would run, so I apt-get remove'd it, yet it still showed in top (this disappeared after the reboot last night but might be related to the topic at hand...)

Not the problem

2)after deciding that my graphics were considerably worse, and desktop effects were not working after installing the ATI 3d accelerator... I disabled the driver (this is the one I would expect caused my issues as I was not prompted to nor did I reboot after disabling the driver)

THIS is your problem. Disabling a video driver and NOT rebooting doesn't work. At least one should log out, restart the xserver, and log back in.

3)installed postgresql and some other related packages (doubt this had anything to do with it as I installed the same set on my laptop... i don't know that for sure though..)

NOT the problem.

I predict, I will get home and find all is well, but if not, I will spend some time getting to know the error log setup

IF you haven't rebooted that would be the first thing I would do. The next thing would be to rename .xsession-errors to .xsession-errors.old and then

touch .xsession-errors

to create a new, empty one.


[/quote]

[motoburn]

Re: .xsession-errors @ 163GiB

2)after deciding that my graphics were considerably worse, and desktop effects were not working after installing the ATI 3d accelerator... I disabled the driver (this is the one I would expect caused my issues as I was not prompted to nor did I reboot after disabling the driver)

THIS is your problem. Disabling a video driver and NOT rebooting doesn't work. At least one should log out, restart the xserver, and log back in.

thought that might have been it
I know now and will make sure to always reboot after that sort of Hardware reconfig. This is how I learn... by breaking stuff

IF you haven't rebooted that would be the first thing I would do. The next thing would be to rename .xsession-errors to .xsession-errors.old and then
touch .xsession-errors
to create a new, empty one.

I rebooted after

rm ~/.xsession-errors

last night. and the new .xsession-errors must have been created on startup as it was there again, but this time was only 100+/- KiB and my available disk space returned to 183 GiB.

I wonder what I will break next

[motoburn]

Re: .xsession-errors @ 163GiB

Ok, back home now, and the .xsession-errors file is only 44.5KiB

here is all that showed when i typed

moto@moto-DellX410:~$ tail -f .xsession-errors
kwin(1633) KWin::Workspace::updateClientArea: Done.
QInotifyFileSystemWatcherEngine::addPaths: inotify_add_watch failed: No such file or directory
QFileSystemWatcher: failed to add paths: /home/moto/.config/ibus/bus
Bus::open: Can not get ibus-daemon's address. 
IBusInputContext::createInputContext: no connection to ibus-daemon 
kwin(1633) KWin::Workspace::allowClientActivation: Activation: Belongs to active application
kwin(1633) KWin::Workspace::allowClientActivation: Activation: Belongs to active application
kwin(1633) KWin::Workspace::allowClientActivation: Activation: Belongs to active application
kwin(1633) KWin::Workspace::allowClientActivation: Activation: Belongs to active application
kwin(1633) KWin::Workspace::allowClientActivation: Activation: Belongs to active application

is ibus-daemon important?

[Snowhog]

Re: .xsession-errors @ 163GiB

Important? Yes. But don't worry about the entries. This file collects a lot of stuff - A LOT. If your system is working as you expect, then "don't think about fixing what isn't actually broke."

[motoburn]

Re: .xsession-errors @ 163GiB

fair enough

I surely won't be changing driver settings and leaving it up again though, and now that I know this file exists, I'll keep an eye on it

I did go into kdebugdialog and disable kwin though... a bit ago, after openning Dophin and navigating to a .chm file to do some studying, kwin showed about 40 entries having to do with Dolphin and none of them were errors.. just 'fyi' entries... I figure I can live without that... after all, the GUI provided quite sufficient feedback by doing exactly what it was supposed to

[Snowhog]

Re: .xsession-errors @ 163GiB

I'm going to be looking at kdebugdialog tonight when I get home. I'm thinking also, of seeing if I can modify the script that controls .xsession-errors and see if I can get it to create a backup file when rebooting, and writing to a fresh .xsession-errors file.