Red Warning: Personal storage getting full -- in Tahrpup6 ??

[vtpup]

I keep getting the big red warning to resize personal storage, but this is in Tahrpup 6.0.5 where supposedly there is an expandable savefolder not a savefile. And in fact if I try to run the "Resize Personal Storage File" Puppy app, it says exactly that -- no, you have a savefolder.

I have about 9 gigs of free space left on the puppy partition. Besides that reported size in the tray applet, I've run gparted to verify the free space, and done an fsck check and repair on the partition, and everything reports fine.

So why am I getting these frequent warning messages? In fact the other day, Seamonkey Mail refused to download mail temporarily because it said that there was not enough disk space.

The actual savefolder, when checked is about 1.7 gig,

With 9 gig more available it seems there's plenty of space.....

[bigpup]

Is this setup with a save icon on the desktop?
Only writes to the save when you tell it to?
If yes.
The save is using a ramdisk that uses ram.
If the free ram gets too low you would get this warning.
Clicking on the save icon would take what is in the save ramdisk and write it to the actual save folder.
Thus freeing up ram.

[vtpup]

Nope Bigpup, this is just an ordinary frugal install on a hard disk drive. No save icon on the desktop. I've been using Tahrpup (frugal) for a couple years.

This is a relatively new install -- not even a year old, and I had started with a fresh 6.0.5, this time instead of what I was using before: an earlier version and then added upgrades via quickpet. That's the only difference I know of.

[vtpup]

Take a look at this (jpg attached)!

It seems Gparted and the free space applet in the tray report that I have nearly 9 GIGs of free space left on partition hda5, while Tahrpup's Partview program is saying that I have 9 MEGs of free space left (yet its bar-graph shows a much large free space segment).

I'm thinking somebody goofed and mistook Megs for Gigs somewhere in this Tahrpup's free space determination and warning system. My system seems to think I have only 9 megs of space left on hda5 and is warning me, and preventing me from doing things like download mail or install programs now.

Suggestions?

[dancytron]

The 9Meg in partview seems like a bug.

However, using partition while it is that full will cause performance issues. It is 95% full. If you Google, you'll see recommendations not to let your partitions get that full.

See https://askubuntu.com/questions/590622/ ... o-maintain

Whether Puppy is giving you Red because it senses that or whether it is just based on percentage based on save files instead of save folders, who knows?

So for max performance, remove some stuff from that partition. If you don't care about that, ignore it.

[bigpup]

Besides the good info that dancytron is giving you.
He makes a good point!
Hard drives always need some minimum free space.

fresh 6.0.5, this time instead of what I was using before: an earlier version and then added upgrades via quickpet

This could be a bug.
Tahrpup was being developed when a lot of tweaking was being done to the save process.

In Quickpet>Help>Installed Bugfixes
What is the date of the most recent fix?

That should tell us what Tahrpup fix package you last installed.
Here is all of the fix packages listed.
The last one is dated Dec 25 2016.
http://distro.ibiblio.org/puppylinux/pu ... /quickpet/

[vtpup]

Thanks dancytron and Bigpup.

Bigpup it is at Tahrfix8 (ie the latest update) over a recent install of 6.05.

I'm afraid I'll have to disagree with you both here re. "the minimum percentage" of a disk drive needed. It's the quantity of free space that's important, relative to the OS size and the data file sizes usually worked with. I do not do large data file or multimedia work with this computer. File sizes are generally small. /mnt/home gets most data, I generally avoid saving data to /root.

Frugal puppy in normal use should be comfortable with 9 gigs of free space -- I've easily run modern puppies on HD's that were 10 gigs total in size -- and for years at a time. I'm not a big data user. This is the first time in 10 years of Puppy usage that I've ever run into a puppy system that limits the pupsave to 2 gigs, and couldn't be enlarged -- the old pupsave file system was better than this new automatic pup folder system. It can't be enlarged manually, so it defeats its own purpose.

Re fragmentation problems... I regularly run fsck on the whole partition, not just the save file, to clean it up, On this drive there is also a linux swap partition available to puppy, and my current save folder is under 2 gigs.

Something is wrong with pupsave code or gparted in Tahrpup -- one or the other is reporting wrong. If Gparted is accurate, and there really is 9 gigs available, then there's enough space available to comfortably run a puppy. As a matter of fact I can run other frugal puppies on this same partition with no reports of problems from them.

My worry is that there is an underlying drivespace allocation problem, and I would like to find out how I could verify which is correct, gparted, or the Tahrpup pupsave code. That's more critical information to me, and if there's a repeatable flaw, other users as well.

[vtpup]

Upun further thought, my guess is that there may be a built-in limit in Tahrpup 6.0.5 for the size of the pupsave folder of 2 gigs. Whether this was intentional or not, I don't know.

At any rate, an easy enough theory to disprove:

Does anyone out there in puppy land have a Tahrpup system with a savefolder larger than 2 gigs?

[version2013]

Upun further thought, my guess is that there may be a built-in limit in Tahrpup 6.0.5 for the size of the pupsave folder of 2 gigs. Whether this was intentional or not, I don't know.

At any rate, an easy enough theory to disprove:

Does anyone out there in puppy land have a Tahrpup system with a savefolder larger than 2 gigs?

One of my Tahrpup frugal installs:
tahr-6.0.5_PAE
PUPMODE=12
save folder = 7.2 GB

[dancytron]

Upun further thought, my guess is that there may be a built-in limit in Tahrpup 6.0.5 for the size of the pupsave folder of 2 gigs. Whether this was intentional or not, I don't know.

At any rate, an easy enough theory to disprove:

Does anyone out there in puppy land have a Tahrpup system with a savefolder larger than 2 gigs?

My guess is it is percentage full. It probably turns red at 90 or 95%.

[vtpup]

Thanks Version2013. Well that's not it then.

Been reading more online. Some suggested possibilities:

The journal on a journaling filesystem might not be counted by Gparted.

But my sda5 partition is ext2 (not a journaling system).

Another possibility: one could run out of inodes.

But doing a df -h in th console shows plenty of them free.

re. fragmentation problems...fsck reports that only 6% of files in sda5 are discontinuous, and there are only 3 large files.

I checked my linux swap partition and it's plenty big -- 8 gigs.

My drive is not 95% full, also, it has multiple partitions with empty space, including the 8 gig swap partition. Partition sda5 is the fullest.

So, still a mystery.......

[vtpup]

dancytron, thanks, but it has more serious effects unfortunately -- programs report that there is not enough free filespace to do some basic operations. If it was just a matter of ignoring the warning it would only be annoying. Not that that's a good thing!

By looking at some scripts it looks like Puppy uses the command df to determine free space. There may be errors in that reporting method. I'm trying to figure that out.

[bigpup]

Try installing this newer version of Freememapplet_tray.
http://distro.ibiblio.org/puppylinux/pe ... 2.8.6f.pet
This helped others with similar problems.

[vtpup]

Sorry BigPup, didn't make a difference. I installed it. but no change.

I also freed up some disk space by deleting some older frugal puppy installs, but there's still about an 8 gig discrepancy in reporting.

For instance, if I hover over the freemem applet in the tray, It says I have 16 GiB free, but if I click on it, the Partview program starts up and it reports that sda5 (the partition in question) has only 7.4 G free.

Does anyone else get this behavior?

See attached pic.....