Gnome is a leaking resourcehog.

["DmD (Spider) Ljungmark" <spider takeit se>]

Okay, today I just experienced a new level of leakage from GNOME in
general.  Disk space.

In fact, it seems GNOME at the global level is horrid about disk cache
management, in regards that it will happily spew out cached files onto
the disk without ever reclaiming or cleaning it, or giving the user a
visible notion of where their space went.

On top of this, GNOME manages the "out of disk space"  in a horrifyingly
bad way, mostly by becoming utterly slow in response and spewing out
more and more error messages on the syslog.

No, I did not recieve a user level notification that my homedir was full
(of course, as an experienced admin I should have known this, kept an
eye on my diskusage and noticed when evolution and nautilus abused my
diskspace and manually erased the files, right? )



Scenario:
My homedir got full due to various caches (no real data is ever stored
in my homedir, all that is on archival or work directories in other
places, therefore my home partition can be kept down to only three
gigabytes of data.....)


The bad: 
Evolution:
 Evolution will happily cache all emails it recieves
into /home/spider/.evolution/mail/imap/<account> ....  

This cache happens wether the user wants it or not, it doesn't matter if
he/she has unchecked 
"[ ] Automatically synchronize remote mail locally"  or that they have
not set "Copy folder content locally for offline operation"  in any
directory.  Evolution still has a copy of the read mails in the cache.


Nautilus (mostly,  add gthumb to the list of badguys as well) :
~/.thumbnails will happily grow to consume several hundreds of megabytes
of data.  That these files haven't been accessed in months, don't even
exist, doesn't really matter. The thumbnails are there for keeping.


The good:
Epiphany:  This is the lovechild of the moment. it clears the cache
entries automagically and behaves nicely!  Applauds! 


The odd:
Gconf:
  Gconf happily complains on the syslog and x session errors, by spewing
out massive upon massive of error messages...    am I expected to read
theese?  This is a bad case of error message missing.   Can something
actually be dealt with here?



Okay, I'll be filing bugs individually against nautilus and evolution
for this, but in the end its a concern that needs desktop wide
attention.

after all, a cache that isn't cleared is a memoryleak,  be it on disk or
in RAM. 


Regards,
  DmD (Spider) Ljungmark