After 1 week of usage, my gnome-terminals have written a total of 48 MB.
Out of this, about 40 MB was cating my favorite test file 4 times for
speed measurement purposes, and the remaining about 8 MB was the normal
tasks I performed, including management of several remote servers via
ssh, compilation of several applications over and over again, and a
complete dist-upgrade to Vivid alpha (not in screen as it's done by
default, but actually writing to the terminal's scrollback) and dist-
upgrading again a few times.

Assuming 75 TB lifetime as mentioned in comment 3 (which is about 1/10
of the actual lifetime measured in this stress-test:
http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-
all-dead), I would have to keep this usage pattern for 30 years and then
it'd cause 0.1% of the SSD wear-out.

Of course your usage patterns might differ significantly and result in
magnitudes higher numbers; let me know if that's the case.

Note: resizing with rewrapping is an issue, if you do it with a large
scrollback then it produces a lot of output, it writes quicker than upon
normal operation. This might be a concern; a workaround could be to
disable rewrapping on resize, using a relatively small scrollback
buffer, or disabling opaque resize in the WM. (The data is in the
ballpark of 5–10 bytes per line on each resize, i.e. probably less than
1 MB if you have 100.000 lines. The real problem is that most WMs send
many resize events during a manual resize.)

In the mean time, I've done a proof of concept in the upstream bug to
store the scrollback in memory, and I'm planning to make it a mainstream
feature.

-- 
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu
Desktop Bugs, which is subscribed to vte in Ubuntu.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1430620

Title:
  gnome-terminal writes excessively to /tmp (affecting SSD drives)

To manage notifications about this bug go to:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/vte/+bug/1430620/+subscriptions

-- 
desktop-bugs mailing list
desktop-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/desktop-bugs

Reply via email to