With large library, doodle database fills up hard drive

[[euchrid]]

Binary package hint: doodle

All the remaining space on my hard drive was filled with the doodle database, and my system was rendered unusable until I found the cause.

I have a 1TB hard drive, approximately 700GB of which is taken up with music files. (I am a DJ and musician, and keep a copy of my music files on my main hard drive). I DID NOT install doodle, but it was installed with the latest upgrade to Lucid Lynx. It is possible that it was installed as part of the Ubuntu Studio package.

After leaving the computer for 2 hours, I returned to find that the 28GB I had previously left free was completely gone. It took me some time to find out that doodle was responsible, as I was not even aware that doodle was running or installed on my machine. My e-mail client could not download e-mails. I could not look up the problem on the internet, because my browser did would not load any pages. No program that required a temp file to run would even start. I tried to move files to a separate hard drive, but even after moving 2GB of files, I still had 0 bytes of room left on the hard drive I was using.

I then used htop to see if it could help. I saw doodle, and remembered having tried it briefly last year, and encountering problems with it taking up a significant amount of CPU and memory. I killed doodle and doodled, and then tried to move 2GB of files to an external hard drive again. Again, I was still unable to use any programs, and I was still left with 0 bytes of space.

I restarted the computer, hoping that this would empty the cache, the tmp directory and so on - but on login, I was left with only the console to work with. I used apt-get to remove doodle, and re-started the system again. This time, I had enough space to start in a graphical environment, but my function keys had become disabled. I am still working on this last issue, and hope another re-start will fix it. I found the /var/lib/doodle folder, and located the db (by checking with Synaptic for installed files), and, logging in as root, deleted the doodle.db file - which was 28GB.

I suggest that to safeguard users, there should be a set-up dialogue after installation before doodle runs for the first time, to ensure that the user is aware that doodle is installed, and, if possible, what percentage of the hard-drive it will require to build the initial database, or, if that is not possible, a warning that shows a rough guide to show the average percentage that doodle normally requires.

Furthermore, I feel that the user should be prompted to set up a cron job or alternative method for when doodle updates its database. The reason I initially uninstalled it was because doodle had decided to refresh the database while I was recording music, and it caused xruns until I completely removed the program.

I appreciate that the steps I took to solve the problem were not ideal. I had an important e-mail to respond to, and was mildly panicked when I couldn't even start Synaptic to remove doodle. If I had thought about it, I would have used apt-get to remove it before trying a system re-start.

I am sure this will only affect users with similarly large hard drives and libraries, or those with little space left, but it is something that seems it could nearly cripple machines of those users who are unaware that doodle is installed on their system.

I am running Lucid Lynx 10.04 (Ubuntu Studio edition). The doodle (and doodled) version was 0.6.7-9 (i386 version).

[drodgers99 (drodgers99)]

I too am a musician and online DJ. Ubuntu Studio v10.04 64 bit. I noticed Pulse audio NICE= -11, IDJC processes all NICE= 0, doodle= +10. Whatever 'doodle's' doing, perhaps its indexing over 7,000 songs on internal 640 GB or external USB 80 GB drives. What concerns me (in my bug report) is doodle sometimes causes IDJC's GUI to freezeup - can't click any buttons, runs jingles/liners ALTERNATE from Playlist 1 to 2 and vice versa. Meanwhile, the online audience is wondering wtf is the dj doing(?). Its rather embarrassing and frustrating. Sometimes I also run Frostwire, several Firefox windows at the same time, but those programs don't seem to lock up. I'm puzzled as to what 'exactly' doodle is -and- what its doing. I share your frustration and am glad I came across your bug report. David Rodgers drodgers99

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[tsh (tsh)]

doodle.db took up nearly 50% of my SSD, and I thought I had disabled all search on my machine.