187777 - new pages won't load if hard-disk is full

Status: VERIFIED WORKSFORME

(Camino Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Stephane Moureau]

If your hard-disk is full, I think you get the following problems:
- Any new URL can not be opened, an error sheet appears immediately, no delay at
all: eg: mozilla.org => ~"The file / can not be opened"
- The settings of the Toolbar (and Finder Dock) is resetted to the default one.

I got those problems when several windows were opened.
Make free space on HD and reboot.
Build 0101.

Comment 1

[Gabriel Bender]

Try clearing the disk cache (Prefs -> Navigation -> History -> Clear Disk
Cache). If you haven't done that in a while, then it can free up 50 megabytes of
space on your hard drive, and provide a temporary solution to this problem. I
also suspect that disabling the disk cache would solve this problem, though I'm
not sure how to do that. I still think that this bug should stay open, though.

Comment 2

[Greg K.]

Adding qawanted. Someone willing to fill up their disk needs to confirm this.
(Or, is this a dup?)

Comment 3

[Mike Pinkerton (not reading bugmail)]

solution, don't do that :)

Comment 4

[Ben Fowler]

I doubt that the OP meant to do it.

The cache system could have a slop setting that means that, say,
10% of the disk is left empty. If browsing is being done whilst
the disk is 'nearly' full then pages should be being evicted
from the cache at a suitable rate.

The browser could warn, and if necessary gracefully shutdown.

This situation can easily be brought about by starting multiple
downloads, and whilst it might be possible to warn if the disk
is getting full when a download is started, it is rarely possible
to pre-flight.

Comment 5

[louis bennett]

see also: bug 228978

Comment 6

[Samuel Sidler (old account; do not CC)]

Does this not happen with FF as well? I'd guess that it does. We really need someone to try this out.

Wevah, is your system still near capacity? Care to give this a go? ;)

Comment 7

[Simon Fraser [no longer active]]

To test, put the disk cache on a small disk image (should be possible to edit prefs.js to do this, or hack AppDirServiceProvider::GetCacheDirectory()).

Comment 8

[Samuel Sidler (old account; do not CC)]

Goodbye Winnie.... :)

Comment 9

[froodian (Ian Leue)]

I just tested this on a full hard drive using 2006030404 (v1.0.0+) (on dialup, can't download newer builds), and OS X (Panther, in this case) threw the "Your Startup Disk is almost full, please free space" dialog at about 1 MB free (as reported by Disk Utility).  At -20 KB free (again, according to Disk Utility -  about 35 windows later), I was still unable to repro, and the system (understandably) was running at a crawl, so I gave up.

Since 
a) This is a fringe case, and hard to encounter, even when trying
b) OS X throws a warning specifically to tell users that their disk is full and weird stuff may happen as a result
c) I couldn't even repro the behavior reported
d) in three years, nobody else has duped, or even repro'd this bug

I propose closing this.  Anybody have objections?

Comment 10

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

I did some symlinking to approximate what Simon suggested in comment 7 (once with just the cache, and once with the whole profile on the dmg) and never experienced a page failing to load in a half-hour of so of testing.  Occasionally hitting a large plugin file would cause a crash (not always, oddly enough), but that's the extent of it.  

Let's assume that in the last 3 years, Necko and Gecko (and Mac OS X) have improved significantly in the low diskspace department ;)