Bug 406395

Summary: konsole history fill tmpfs
Product: [Applications] konsole Reporter: humufr
Component: historyAssignee: Konsole Developer <konsole-devel>
Status: CONFIRMED ---    
Severity: normal CC: mglb
Priority: NOR    
Version: 18.12.3   
Target Milestone: ---   
Platform: Arch Linux   
OS: Linux   
Latest Commit: Version Fixed In:

Description humufr 2019-04-10 07:57:43 UTC 
SUMMARY


Recently konsole had a strange behaviour and is filling the tmpfs (/tmp) with a huge history file. My scrollback was configured to be unlimited as it is for years. I tried to update my system and I noticed some error message at the installation of the kernel. I investigated and find that tmpfs was full. I removed the files in it and everything went back to normal (I finished the update properly) but the day after I got the same problem when doing normal operation. This time I looked a little bit more in the culprit and found that konsole had a nearly 8Gb history file! It never happen before so I am suspecting a new bug.
I am removing the "unlimited scrollback" for the time beeing and it seems to be a working workaround.

I filled a bug report on archlinux (https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/62292) but it was considered as 'not a bug'. I must admit that I am surprised that a software who fill a file in less a day with nearly 8Gb is considered as a normal behavior and so not a bug especially when the stability of the system is in cause and that I never had that behavior before (same configuration for years) so the bug report here since it is not considered one due to the packaging.

Thanks for KDE.

STEPS TO REPRODUCE
1. Start console
2. Configure scrollback to be unlimited
3. wait and see the error message appearing because of the full tmpfs

OBSERVED RESULT

Full tmpfs (/tmp )

EXPECTED RESULT

Normal size for history for a single day of usage.

SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS
Linux/KDE Plasma: 
(available in About System)
KDE Plasma Version: 18.12.3
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.56.0
Qt Version: 5.12.2 (build agains 5.12.1)

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Comment 1 Mariusz Glebocki 2019-04-10 21:24:29 UTC 
Konsole v18.12.03, Ubuntu 18.04
Test environment: default config (ran with empty $HOME) + infinite scrollback + store history in /tmp.


Before:
   0  tmp/konsole-J14446.history
   0  tmp/konsole-M14446.history
   0  tmp/konsole-T14446.history

Running: base64 -w 511 /dev/urandom | head -n $((1024 * 1024))

After:
 48M  tmp/konsole-L14446.history
8.0G  tmp/konsole-S14446.history
6.0M  tmp/konsole-n14446.history

The command above prints "512MB" of characters (assuming 1 character = 1B). Character struct has 16B, so it is consistent with Konsole code.
For reference: This is slightly above 6.7 million lines with 80 characters each.


Lets try compressing history file (i.e. single-format random alphanumeric characters).

Algorithm: LZ4, 4MB block, fast compression (1)
Result: 8GB reduced to 1.5G => 3B/character.

Characters with single format have most of the structure repeated. Additionally, most people do not read half GB of random characters (I hope so).


More realistic input:

Running: find src tests tools \( -name '*.cpp' -or -name '*.h' -or -name '*.py' \) -exec pygmentize  {} \;

  24M /tmp/konsole-F14446.history
  47K /tmp/konsole-V14446.history
 374K /tmp/konsole-a14446.history

This outputs all Konsole source files, colorized. But not too much colorized (only keywords, function name in definitions, strings, primitive types, preprocessor). Good simulation of fancy prompt, colorful greps and ls here and there, errors/warnings from compiler, and mostly regular text.

Algorithm: The same as above
Result: 24M reduced to 3.8M => 2.5B/character.

This might be even better with another algorithm; LZ4 is just the first fast algorithm I thought of.


Actually it would be great to use compression even on in-memory history. I'll probably implement compression after finishing my current tasks, unless someone else wants to do it.