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[Bug 1240848] Re: ~/.cache/upstart takes up around 70GB of space due to unity and mediascanner

 

This is a largely misleading bug, at least as far as Unity is concerned.

The default set up is to rotate all user-session logs once every hour,
with 7 previous logs saved compressed.  With a normally operating
desktop session, this should be more than good enough.

Where things go awry is if you get something like Xorg or an X11 client
spamming the logs with messages.  All application messages from programs
running in the desktop session get logged to the desktop session log,
generally called gnome-session-Unity.log or unity7.log, depending on the
release of Ubuntu, or unity-panel-service.log for indicators.  The
misleading bit is that the vast majority of these spam messages are not
in fact coming from Unity (which is relatively quiet) but from some
application program you have chosen to run by clicking on a desktop icon
or indicator you have installed.

In short, there is nothing Unity can do to reduce the amount of garbage
being logged from third-party application programs.  Unity has no
control over what an arbitrary program outputs and does not have any
access to the output streams from applications that it launches so it
could add filters.

The only way to get bugs in arbitrary applications fixed is to file bugs
against the broken applications explicitly.  Filing a bug against the
desktop shell that launches the applications will not bring much joy.

I'm marking this as invalid for Unity, since the problem does not
originate in Unity nor is it possible to provide a fix in Unity for
problems elsewhere.  Bugs need to be filed against the individual
applications causing the problem.

** Changed in: unity
       Status: New => Invalid

** Changed in: unity (Ubuntu)
       Status: Confirmed => Invalid

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1240848

Title:
  ~/.cache/upstart takes up around 70GB of space due to unity and
  mediascanner

Status in Unity:
  Invalid
Status in mediascanner package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed
Status in unity package in Ubuntu:
  Invalid

Bug description:
  I just noticed that ~/.cache/upstart/ folder on my computer is taking
  up 69GB of space. Upon further investigation, I found out that
  mediascanner.log and unity-panel-service.log take 12GB and 54GB of
  space respectively.

  I'm not entirely sure if this is related to upstart as I had removed
  logrotate package because of a conflict.

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