Netsurf Ate My Bootloader Files

Greetings comrades in ARMs!
Once upon a time, an SD card that my Pandaboard booted from suddenly wouldn’t work any more. Only Panda’s right green eye lit up and the screen was black. So I prepared a fresh SD card for Panda which works.
The old card was readable and Disc Knight said ‘disc is good’. Yesterday, I thought I would try and get it to boot Panda once again. System Disc came to the rescue. It said that Netsurf’s Cache in ScrapDir had eaten all the files in the bootloader ‘partition’. Sure enough there was a massive 7MB file in Netsurf.Cache.00.00.00.27 undigested.
How can this happen?
I was pleasantly surprised that System Disc could give such information rather than saying somethimg less informative like “no bootloader files” or “bootloader files corrupted”. System Disc said that the partition was valid or something like that and so I just had to copy in the bootloader files (see thread “Using laest Uboot to boot a Pandaboard” (sic) in General subforum – it’s all changed). Now Panda boots once more.
Moral: Get System Disc, but beware that it’s help is now out of date.

I have just found an even more massive 11MB file squatting in !Scrap.ScrapDirs.ScrapDir.WWW.NetSurf – ie, not the cache.

Netsurf again! Perhaps we should ask the Netsurf team what they are up to. :-)

Thanks for this thread. There are some pretty damn large files in Scrap→WWW.NetSurf.Cache.[lots of “00”]. The top of the file says “bitmap” and there’s no readable text to be found, so I’ve nuked the lot of them…

Look at the date stamps of NetSurf’s Cache’d files in Scrap. That cache-ing scheme is long gone and is now superseded by the !Cache method.

Netsurf again! Perhaps we should ask the Netsurf team what they are up to.

Caching data as rapidly as possible. Perhaps, as Rick said elsewhere a bug in the file system was significant.

Look at the date stamps of NetSurf’s Cache’d files in Scrap. That cache-ing scheme is long gone and is now superseded by the !Cache method.

“Long gone?” The !Cache method is still in its first year IIRC. Still by my age a year is but the blink of an eye. :)

I have files in SCrapDir.WWW.Netsurf dated today … and in !Cache.Caches.Default.Netsurf

Are both being used? (This is with Netsurf 3.2)

Are both being used? (This is with Netsurf 3.2)

No. The new persistant cache was introduced with #1956 in June 2014. I don’t know when the old Scrap cache stopped being used. As far as I can see the only thing that NetSurf now puts in Scrap is its log.

I deleted !Cache as it made Netsurf (V3.2) very slow with the hourglass coming up all the time. It seemed to make Netsurf less stable too. !Cache had swollen to a massive size.
!Cache seems to be for application authors. The help file says “… can be used by application authors to store semi-permanent data.” and “You must not assume that Cache is present on the user’s system however, as Cache is not an official part of the system (like Scrap).”. I am surprised it was included in the skeleton !Boot directory for merging into !Boot.Resources as most users would be unaware of its presence or think it just a new version of the Cache in Scrap as I did intially.

`!Cache` is not “for developers”, it is for users. It is simply a place to put files that you want to last across sessions, unlike `!Scrap`, which may be wiped when you restart. NetSurf’s disc cache stores its files to `!Cache` rather than `!Scrap`, so `!Cache` needs to be present for the disc cache to be used.

The issues are:

1. On RISC OS writing to files does not happen in the background, it blocks everything so writing large files to disc will give an hourglass.
2. These days on the internet, web pages and the file sizes of their conent are large.
3. Most RISC OS systems have really slow disc write/read speeds, so there is little to be gained by disc caching anyway.

To disable the disc cache simply configure the disc cache size to be zero, as described in the documentation .