Low disk space notification is a little useless

[William Grant]

Binary package hint: nautilus

Nautilus popped up a warning dialog when my 30GB root partition had around 2GB free. I felt that 2GB was quite enough for a while, so I ignored the warning. 15 minutes later (after I'd scheduled a few Alpha 5 torrents), I discovered I had 0 bytes free when Transmission paused all of the torrents.

Nautilus should definitely give a warning when there is no space left, and should very probably give further warnings before that. The current warning is far too far from full to be useful.

[A. Walton (awalton)]

nautilus nor gvfs link to libnotify.

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

This is gnome-settings-daemon which displays this warning. It's currently designed to poll your disk once per minute, and will display a warning when free space gets to less than 5% and 2GB, and then display further warnings each time the space decreases by another 1% if at least 10 minutes passed since the last warning.

Are you saying that this 10 minutes delay should be adjusted?

[William Grant (wgrant)]

Ah, I see. Perhaps, then, the additional intermediate warnings are not required. However, I cannot think why it would not want to notify about the filesystem being completely full as soon as it noticed.

[2hot6ft2 (hot6ft2)]

I received a popup saying I had only 1.3GB free space on my disk when in fact I had almost 30GB of free space.
How can this be?
Does the file system actually have a limit as to how many files it can contain or how many bytes/Mbytes/Gbytes it can have in it?
If this is the case then I consider this a major bug.
Looks like I can only post 1 attachment so I will follow this with the Disk Usage Analyzer Screen shot

[2hot6ft2 (hot6ft2)]

Here's the Disk Usage Analyzer Screen shot

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

This isn't really the appropriate place to ask for support, and g-s-d probably isn't doing anything wrong in your case. It calculates the free space remaining after calling statvfs on the particular volume, so you probably really are running low on disk space. Please post the output of "df -h" so I can tell.

And yes, filesystems do have limitations on how many files / folders can be stored, and how large the partition size can be etc. Those aren't bugs though, but rather limitations of the file system structure (eg, FAT32 has a maximum file size of 4GB and maximum partition size of 2TB). That's not your issue though

[2hot6ft2 (hot6ft2)]

I found out that it was just looking at / and not the partition itself. So I apologise for posting it here as it's obviously not a bug in my case. Sorry for taking your time and thanks for the response.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for gnome-settings-daemon (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]