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• jgross42
  
  

  • Rank: Freshman
  • Registered: Dec 16, 2003
  • Last visit: Oct 21, 2009
  • Posts: 52

  Posted: Sep 08, 2005 - 03:37 AM

  ...and a fine, Gothically blood-chilling one too, recounted here for your edification and entertainment. One dark and stormy night I noticed on my host's control panel that, during the course of August, while I was mostly thinking about other matters (summery things like beaches, sunshine, girls in swimsuits, girls with smaller swimsuits...), the size of the webspace used up by my three or four little sites had multiplied from their normal two or three hundred megas to over 4,000 M. The case was I had and have an autobio site on some version of Postnuke which I have forgotten, except that I know it was a release candidate or even a beta, not a release, so I suppose the fault is mine. Anyway, this little beggar had set itself to caching away merrily as if there were no tomorrow (God knows why, I thought I had deactivated all forms of caching). And its pnTemp/Xanthia_cache had swollen to over 4 GB in nearly a million files.
  
  So the problem was how to delete them. My FTP program took a look at the directory, curled up and died. My account control panel (when it worked, only a fraction of the time) would only let me deal with a maximum of hundred files at a time, with which I would have taken the rest of the month to empty the directory. And with Telnet, 'rm *.*' returned 'Argument list too long' while using 'rmdir -f' I was being asked for delete confirmation on every file - imagine having to press 'Y' then 'Enter' nine hundred thousand times, like something out of Dante.
  
  Meanwhile, I asked my host's technical people for assistance, so their commercial department promptly informed me of my disk overusage charges for August (of course, it's the nature of the beast).
  
  Happy ending follows. This solution is probably glaringly obvious to you programming types, but I was quite pleased with myself. I noticed that all the cached file names had the same length, 70 characters and, even better, began with a few hexadecimal numbers. Specifying one number followed by 69 question marks dot asterisk still got me the 'Argument list too long' message, but two and 68 wildcards didn't, so I was able to rm -f them in groups, and it only took an hour.
  
  Moral - dunno, really. Must be one, though.
  
  --
  John Ross
  
  Spain and Portugal for Visitors

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• Simon
  
  

  • Rank: Legend
  • Registered: Dec 11, 2002
  • Last visit: Oct 21, 2009
  • Posts: 11674

  Posted: Sep 08, 2005 - 04:17 AM

  Did you by any chance set your cache expire time to something huge?
  
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• jgross42
  
  

  • Rank: Freshman
  • Registered: Dec 16, 2003
  • Last visit: Oct 21, 2009
  • Posts: 52

  Posted: Sep 08, 2005 - 06:30 AM

  No, I checked (before removing Xanthia as a module altogether) - it was set to 3600 (3600 what, I've never known - seconds? minutes? Anyway, isn't that the default value?).
  
  Whatever, don't think I want this treated as a problem needing to be solved, because it isn't -- I'd have posted under a different forum heading if it had been. I was just passing on an anecdote (which doesn't preclude discussion, either, of course).
  
  --
  John Ross
  
  Spain and Portugal for Visitors

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• Simon
  
  

  • Rank: Legend
  • Registered: Dec 11, 2002
  • Last visit: Oct 21, 2009
  • Posts: 11674

  Posted: Sep 08, 2005 - 08:52 AM

  I know, it was just the only thing I could think of to cause that problem, and I was interested...
  
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  birtwistle.me.uk - Personal Blog
  
  
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• Lobos
  
  

  • Rank: Expert
  • Registered: Dec 02, 2002
  • Last visit: Apr 30, 2010
  • Posts: 1474

  Posted: Sep 10, 2005 - 02:01 AM

  What I would like to know; is there any measures in place to stop this happening? What did Jgross do wrong?
  
  Regards
  
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  -Lobos
  Professional PHP Framework Services: Concept, Development and Deployment

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• Simon
  
  

  • Rank: Legend
  • Registered: Dec 11, 2002
  • Last visit: Oct 21, 2009
  • Posts: 11674

  Posted: Sep 10, 2005 - 07:14 AM

  Perhaps PHP didn't have permission to delete files from the directory? It's very hard to say without seeing the problem itself.
  
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  itbegins.co.uk - Zikula Consulting
  
  birtwistle.me.uk - Personal Blog
  
  
  Please read the Support Guide

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