#634 High IO activity on every login

[Sworddragon]

I'm using lxsession 0.4.9.2+git20140216 and I'm noticing that after every login into the desktop I'm hearing many IO activity from my disk. On checking this with inotify there are nearly 400 write operations per login on ~/.cache/lxsession/LXDE/run.log. Maybe lxsession can cache this a little to optimize the IO performance here.

[wxl]

there is a bug report on the Ubuntu tracker about run.log getting filled up.

there are several things that could cause problems, such as application errors. that being said, it doesn't seem that lxsession is causing the problem.

as mentioned on the bug report, there are bad calls to lxsession that can cause the problem, but again, this is not lxsession's fault.

what does seem to be the problem is how the logs are dealt with. why is syslog not used? is there a reason to have this in a user folder and not be in global logs? moreover, why is this in a cache folder? what sense does that make? logrotate can't do much to help things out this way. how does one turn logging on or off or affect verbosity?

the thing i'm shocked about, though, is why this never was a problem before. what's changed?

[Sworddragon]

there is a bug report on the Ubuntu tracker about run.log getting filled up.

On my system only the ~400 lines are written on login and then normally nothing happens anymore. In the attachments is the log but there is something interesting. It says often that it creates keys for /home/sworddragon/.config/lxsession/LXDE/desktop.conf and then "Saving desktop file". I'm wondering why this desktop file gets always saved as there are in real no changes to previous logins. This happens in this case 38 times which causes many unneeded write operations too.

[wxl]

On my system only the ~400 lines are written on login and then normally
nothing happens anymore.

I assume the log is rotated at logout?

Either way, I think the question of how logs are handled is the problem.

[Sworddragon]

I assume the log is rotated at logout?

Probably but I have deleted in this case the old log before to go sure that there are no old entries. I'm also not seeing after several hours much more lines (currently there are only ~100 extra lines).

[wxl]

I don't know but I have deleted the old log before to go sure that there are
no old entries.

try this:
1. shutdown and log out cleanly
2. use a live cd to boot or boot without starting the gui
3. look to see if the file is there

if it still is, it would suggest the log remains there.

another thing that you might want to do is watch the size of the log
over several logins. if it's increasing every time, then that also
suggest it remains there.

either way, if you have a buggy application, it's going to fill it up.

so i again suggest the problem is in how logs are handled.

[Sworddragon]

I have checked it and ~/.cache/lxsession/LXDE/run.log gets truncated on every login. In the attachments are also 2 inotify logs. inotify_run.log is for ~/.cache/lxsession/LXDE and inotify_desktop.log is for ~/.config/lxsession/LXDE. inotify_run.log shows the many MODIFY entries as mentioned in the startpost but I'm now not sure if this is really a problem (but maybe it could still be optimized) as inotify_desktop.log shows that there is indeed an I/O issue on handling the desktop configuration file.

[wxl]

well, i don't have this same problem, so i'm not sure LXDE is to blame
so much as some app.

still, it highlights how a buggy app can create a problem, especially
on a computer that is constantly left on.