[Bug] Some old thumbnails remain unneccessarily in phone disk cache
asked 2015-02-27 11:11:48 +0200
UPD:
Since this incident happened I had a lot of time to think abut all this so now there is a few things i would like to say. First of all i would like to make my excuses to the people who hate this kind of thing and had to see this. Secondly I would like to say that i really went too far in this one and i knew that before I've started to write. But the thing i understand now is that I (and anyone else) shouldn't write chaotic evil posts to spoil lawful neutral/good ambiance thoroughly created and maintained by the community. I've learned my lesson and not going to do that again. Thanks for attention.
You better see it yourself:
/.thumbnails/normal/ en masse
/.thumbnails/normal/ that tiny slider
Found this thing with a FileBrowser with "Show hidden files" turned on in /nemo/.thumbnails/normal/
There is another stash at /nemo/.cache/.nemothumbs/raw/
/.cache/.nemothumbs/raw/ en masse
/.cache/.nemothumbs/raw/ contents of folder
This is not how it should be as these includes thumbnails of images I've deleted and already forgot they existed. There are ~2k thumbnails in total of every single image that was on my phone since last Factory Reset. And how this massive amount of junk affects performance (actually most probably nohow)?
It seems like deleting them all resulted in ~12% less memory(RAM) usage (though most likely this is false judgment as facts say these two things can hardly be connected and i didn't really measure it right before removing the trash but for me it definitely dropped lower than usual). Who knows.
UPD: it would be quite nice if a couple of people would measure memory(RAM) consumption with for example Lighthouse before and after cleaning and post here the results and if someone skilled would search restricted areas in phone memory for such clusters with SSH.
Hivemind's possible solutions:
If system creates junk it shouldn't be user's problem to control that junk collection process. Simplest way to deal with this would be to have a really tiny program which wipes out those two directories every (for example) midnight and recreates thumbs for pictures present in phone/card memory right away. Ideally user should not even expect this program to exist but letting the user configure periods between those cleanings does not seem like a bad idea too. But all that's just tasteless.
Maybe to somehow attach thumbnails to initial picture so when it gets removed whole chain goes down.
Sounds pretty normal to me, the gallery will need thumbnails to display in the UI.
r0kk3rz ( 2015-02-27 11:18:30 +0200 )editNot sure if it's a bug, but yes, you can delete them safely, I have deleted the folder a number of times without problems.
Just checked in mine, found 846 and deleted them by deleting the entire 'normal' folder, even the .data file in the .thumbnails dir can be removed, a new one will regenerate.
Spam Hunter ( 2015-02-27 11:23:19 +0200 )editWhat do you expect? That Gallery generates thumbnails every time from scratch? That would be unbelievable slow. How many pictures do you have on your phone?
ejjoman ( 2015-02-27 11:36:18 +0200 )edit@ejjoman, excluing images of music albums covers and scans which I'd rather like not to see in a gallery? Then 9. Otherwise gallery is unusable. Also I would rather like it to show thumbnails for images in the FileBrowser itself. And I would definitly expect the system to clean this mess after photoes been long (long-long-long) gone.
I suppose indexation of those images (~2k?) hardly makes system faster.
Odorobo ( 2015-02-27 11:45:37 +0200 )editSure. Go ahead and delete them. Next time you open your gallery it will generate a thumbnail for each picture. Profit? I don't think so...
Thumbnails are cached so that they don't have to be generated every time they are shown to you. Generating them on the fly is a little more processor intensive than just pulling them from cache.
Okw ( 2015-02-27 11:47:12 +0200 )edit