Bug 317799

Summary:	"Disable swap files syncing" option does not work
Product:	[Applications] kate	Reporter:	André Martins <aanm90>
Component:	kwrite	Assignee:	KWrite Developers <kwrite-bugs-null>
Status:	RESOLVED NOT A BUG
Severity:	major	CC:	christoph, code, micael.capitao
Priority:	NOR
Version:	unspecified
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	Other
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:
Attachments:	Dropbox screenshots...

Description André Martins 2013-04-03 20:11:27 UTC

After select the option "Disable swap files syncing" the file is created regardless of the choice

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to Settings
2. Select Open/Save on the left "menu"
3. Select the Advanced tab
4. Select the "Disable swap files syncing"
5. Write something on kwrite
6. See the *.kate-swp on the FS
Actual Results:  
The step 6 on the previous list

Expected Results:  
Not create the *.kate-swp file

Comment 1 Micael Capitão 2013-04-03 20:16:40 UTC

Same here with Arch Linux x86_64.

Comment 2 Dominik Haumann 2013-04-03 20:29:39 UTC

Right, as I understand it "Disable swap file syncing" disables that the swap file is forcibly written each 15 seconds to the disk, which may be bad on portable or network devices.

Pleas note that the option does not say "Disable swap files", it's just about the frequent synchronization.

In other words, disabling the swap files is not supported currently. If you really do not want a swap file, then please open a new report stating this clearly: "Add option to disable swap files".
I'll close this as invalid, since the report does not match the discussed option at all.

Comment 3 André Martins 2013-04-03 20:34:14 UTC

15 seconds? The file is updated after I write a single character! This is really bad to SSD :-(

Comment 4 Christoph Cullmann 2013-04-03 20:44:02 UTC

If you disable syncing, no fsync will be done at all, then you are fine. Beside, even if all 15 secs fsync is done, your system writes much more other data to disk the whole time, that will really have close to 0 impact on your disk live. Believe my, all my machines run on SSDs only since 2-3 years.

Comment 5 Felix Walter 2013-07-15 16:56:34 UTC

Through the behaviour of my Dropbox sync I can see that on each key press the .kate-swp file _is_ changed (it grows in size), even with the syncing option disabled, so this option does definitely NOT work as intended. I will attach screenshots of the Dropbox log after I did the following:
1. Create file "test.txt" in Dropbox folder
2. Open with KWrite, type "Hello World"
3. Save file and close KWrite

There seem to be even bigger problems when using sshfs because the file is updated every time a key is pressed. Please look into that.

You can find the new report asking for an option to completely disable swap files as bug #321135 ...

Comment 6 Felix Walter 2013-07-15 17:04:47 UTC

Created attachment 81130 [details]
Dropbox screenshots...