Dolphin and Wastebin

This forum is dedicated to basic help and support :

Ask here your questions about basic installation and usage of Mageia. For example you may post here all your questions about getting Mageia isos and installing it, configuring your printer, using your word processor etc.

Try to ask your questions in the right sub-forum with as much details as you can gather. the more precise the question will be, the more likely you are to get a useful answer

Dolphin and Wastebin

Postby MikeFinch » Sep 6th, '21, 02:40

I am using Mageia 8 KDE.

I have just tried to delete the Wastebin after being informed that it was full. Delete wouldn't work on one file so I resorted to using the Konsole as Root. Eventually I cleared everything, but it seems necessary for the developers to smarten up the behaviour between Dolphin and the Wastebin.

In the /.local/share/Trash/files folder were listed "ancient" folders not displayed in Dolphin. And Dolphin's View/Refresh was erratic.

Another observation (going back several Mageias) is the apparent "jumping the gun" behaviour of the Copying window in Dolphin. The display seems to inform that copying is finished when the flashdrive is still flashing. Is it Dolphin "j.t.g." or the USB stick lagging?

Cheers (nothing else to whinge about!)
Last edited by isadora on Sep 6th, '21, 08:32, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Topic moved into appropriate sub-forum
MikeFinch
 
Posts: 61
Joined: Apr 12th, '12, 07:20

Re: Dolphin and Wastebin

Postby morgano » Sep 6th, '21, 17:17

Hi there
For those problems, you should head to upstream (KDE) bug reporting.
Mandriva since 2006, Mageia 2011 at home & work. Thinkpad T40, T43, T400, T510, Dell M4400, M6300, Acer Aspire 7. Workstation using LVM, LUKS, VirtualBox, BOINC
morgano
 
Posts: 1306
Joined: Jun 15th, '11, 17:51
Location: Kivik, Sweden

Re: Dolphin and Wastebin

Postby doktor5000 » Sep 6th, '21, 18:03

MikeFinch wrote:Another observation (going back several Mageias) is the apparent "jumping the gun" behaviour of the Copying window in Dolphin. The display seems to inform that copying is finished when the flashdrive is still flashing. Is it Dolphin "j.t.g." or the USB stick lagging?

The USB Stick. Copying is usually asynchronous, hence it takes longer for the storage device to complete the writes for most slower flash storages.
Cauldron is not for the faint of heart!
Caution: Hot, bubbling magic inside. May explode or cook your kittens!
----
Disclaimer: Beware of allergic reactions in answer to unconstructive complaint-type posts
User avatar
doktor5000
 
Posts: 17629
Joined: Jun 4th, '11, 10:10
Location: Leipzig, Germany

Re: Dolphin and Wastebin

Postby morgano » Sep 7th, '21, 23:41

Buffering and slow writing is the cause.
But i think it should be technically possible to make the user interface reflect when it is actually finished.
Mandriva since 2006, Mageia 2011 at home & work. Thinkpad T40, T43, T400, T510, Dell M4400, M6300, Acer Aspire 7. Workstation using LVM, LUKS, VirtualBox, BOINC
morgano
 
Posts: 1306
Joined: Jun 15th, '11, 17:51
Location: Kivik, Sweden

Re: Dolphin and Wastebin

Postby doktor5000 » Sep 8th, '21, 17:09

Yes, and because of the slow writing copying is done asynchronously. And making the copying wait until it's completed is not that easy, have a look at e.g. https://unix.stackexchange.com/question ... 236#181236 for some context information.
We had this in the past when we basically had basically synchronous copying, and your system slowed to a crawl and became unresponsive until larger copying processes to slow storage finished, I don't want that to come back.

You can simply "eject" the removable drive, and it will not complete the eject process until everything has been written to that drive.
Cauldron is not for the faint of heart!
Caution: Hot, bubbling magic inside. May explode or cook your kittens!
----
Disclaimer: Beware of allergic reactions in answer to unconstructive complaint-type posts
User avatar
doktor5000
 
Posts: 17629
Joined: Jun 4th, '11, 10:10
Location: Leipzig, Germany

Re: Dolphin and Wastebin

Postby morgano » Sep 9th, '21, 04:46

The problem here is that the user dialogue say it is finished when it is not, and may foul the user.

No the operation shall not be changed, it should still be cached - but it should not lie to the user.
Most USB drives do not have a LED, and i tend to watch some app monitoring disk write speed, like gkrellm. But it really feels stupid. And sometimes I use the eject trick yes.
Easy or not to solve, it is a usability bug.

For just the case of copying dialogues,
One idea is if the program issue "sync /dev/the_target_drive"
I think that would be good for flash stick, but if you are copying some files to a folder on an internal drive you do not want to trig writing of all other files the system may be working with.
To be more universal, the copying program should first issue copying of all files like it is now, then issue a "sync list_of_files" for every one of them, and wait for that to finish while showing "Writing..." and optimally speed and estimated time left.

And by the way what happens if the copying dialog close when kernel is still writing buffered data, and the drive malfunctions...
Mandriva since 2006, Mageia 2011 at home & work. Thinkpad T40, T43, T400, T510, Dell M4400, M6300, Acer Aspire 7. Workstation using LVM, LUKS, VirtualBox, BOINC
morgano
 
Posts: 1306
Joined: Jun 15th, '11, 17:51
Location: Kivik, Sweden

Re: Dolphin and Wastebin

Postby doktor5000 » Sep 9th, '21, 15:23

morgano wrote:No the operation shall not be changed, it should still be cached - but it should not lie to the user.
[...]
And by the way what happens if the copying dialog close when kernel is still writing buffered data, and the drive malfunctions...


It does not lie. The application starts the copy operation, this is written to memory buffers, and then the kernels tells the application that the copy is completed.
Then the kernel begins to write out those memory buffers to disk, according to what you have set for the various sysctl's like vm.dirty_bytes / vm.dirty_ratio which can differ for every system.

And if the drive malfunctions, then there's nothing that the kernel or the application can do about that, no matter if a copy is still in progress or not.

But this is the wrong place to submit such enhancement requests. Either submit it upstream at e.g. KDE bugzilla or with the kernel.
Cauldron is not for the faint of heart!
Caution: Hot, bubbling magic inside. May explode or cook your kittens!
----
Disclaimer: Beware of allergic reactions in answer to unconstructive complaint-type posts
User avatar
doktor5000
 
Posts: 17629
Joined: Jun 4th, '11, 10:10
Location: Leipzig, Germany

Re: Dolphin and Wastebin

Postby morgano » Sep 9th, '21, 16:59

Yes as i said upstream.

This UI bug is like the waiter would tell the guest that food is ready, while he has just handed over the order to the kitchen. ;)

Easiest fix is probably to simply add a note "Buffered write may still be in progress", even better actually detect whether it is and animate it somehow.
Mandriva since 2006, Mageia 2011 at home & work. Thinkpad T40, T43, T400, T510, Dell M4400, M6300, Acer Aspire 7. Workstation using LVM, LUKS, VirtualBox, BOINC
morgano
 
Posts: 1306
Joined: Jun 15th, '11, 17:51
Location: Kivik, Sweden

Re: Dolphin and Wastebin

Postby doktor5000 » Sep 10th, '21, 16:00

You could propose that upstream, which implements watching e.g. the status of /sys/block/<device>/stat after copy to slow storage.
See https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/48241/83329 or https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/block/stat.txt for some more context information.
Cauldron is not for the faint of heart!
Caution: Hot, bubbling magic inside. May explode or cook your kittens!
----
Disclaimer: Beware of allergic reactions in answer to unconstructive complaint-type posts
User avatar
doktor5000
 
Posts: 17629
Joined: Jun 4th, '11, 10:10
Location: Leipzig, Germany


Return to Basic support

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 1 guest

cron