Bug 129269

Summary: Endless auto-save: Data lost (lack of available inodes in /tmp ?)
Product: LibreOffice Reporter: Alberto Salvia Novella <es20490446e>
Component: frameworkAssignee: Not Assigned <libreoffice-bugs>
Status: NEW ---    
Severity: normal CC: es20490446e, oliver.brinzing
Priority: medium    
Version: 6.3.2.2 release   
Hardware: All   
OS: Linux (All)   
See Also: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=65509
Whiteboard:
Crash report or crash signature: Regression By:

Description Alberto Salvia Novella 2019-12-07 17:45:26 UTC
It happened at random. At some point auto-save just started endlessly looping, and after plenty of minutes I had to terminate it. The document then was destroyed. For the record its size was 360MB.

It could be that the bug has been there for plenty of time, as there are many potential duplicates:

Endless autosave loop
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=95151

Loop in autosave
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=113344

autosave locks program into continuous loop
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=106032

If you need the document email me for it, as this bug-tracker hangs while uploading it.
Comment 1 Kevin Knerr 2020-01-30 09:55:02 UTC
Arch Linux, libreoffice-fresh 6.3.4-1

I've also experienced this issue twice in the past 2 weeks with an ~825K .ods file. (The first version of this file was created in Sep 2018 and I did not experience this issue until Jan 23, 2020.)

I believe I've identified the culprit on my system. 2 weeks ago, I re-enabled a thumbnail maintenance cron job which runs weekly. What I didn't realize is that /tmp was filling with 0-byte magick-*.pam files and magick-* symlinks as a result of this script.

When I deleted these 0-byte files, Calc completed an autosave and stopped looping.

I didn't think to get a count of the 0-byte files, but I strongly suspect the issue is a lack of available inodes in /tmp, since LO also uses /tmp while creating the auto-save.

I'm not sure it's within the scope of LO, but perhaps the autosave code should exit and warn the user if LO is unable to create the necessary files in /tmp?
Comment 2 Timur 2020-01-30 10:01:31 UTC
Alberto, please write your OS. Is Kevin's case related to yours?
Comment 3 Alberto Salvia Novella 2020-01-30 15:01:25 UTC
It could be the same issue, as I'm using Manjaro Linux.
Comment 4 Alberto Salvia Novella 2020-04-30 19:06:58 UTC
My drive died three months later...
Comment 5 a.geno 2021-12-04 12:55:39 UTC
I have the same issue in Impress (I only use Impress, so I don't know if it's present in other components).

Version: 7.2.3.2 / LibreOffice Community
Build ID: 20(Build:2)
CPU threads: 8; OS: Linux 5.15; UI render: default; VCL: gtk3
Locale: en-US (en_US.UTF-8); UI: en-US
7.2.3-1
Calc: threaded
Comment 6 QA Administrators 2023-12-05 03:15:56 UTC Comment hidden (obsolete)
Comment 7 Alberto Salvia Novella 2023-12-05 17:15:11 UTC
Probably it would be better if LibreOffice used "~/.cache" instead of "/tmp".

I cannot test it, because these days I rarely need to use office suites.