[OSM-talk] JOSM should delete image caches on exit

[Tom Taylor]

On 11/01/2014 11:02 PM, Joseph R. Justice wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 11, 2014 at 10:04 PM, Tom Taylor <tom.taylor.stds at gmail.com
> <mailto:tom.taylor.stds at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     I started a virus scan a couple of days ago and wondered why
>     scanning seemed to hang up on a particular file. Investigating
>     further I found it was a folder -- of cached Bing images dating back
>     from the first days of my remote mapping activity to the present.
>     There were 450,000 of them! It has taken me two days running at 100%
>     computer utilization much of the time to get rid of them. (Maybe I
>     did it wrong. Simply deleting the containing folder containing the
>     last 150,000 just took a couple of minutes.)
>
>
> Oops, re the 450,000 files.  As for the time / effort it tool to remove
> them, you might have been deleting them one by one from the directory,
> especially if you were doing it from a GUI interface than from the
> command line -- again, Oops.
>
>
>     Caching images for a given session makes lots of sense, but leaving
>     them forever really does not. How do I put a request in to the JOSM
>     developers to ensure that images caches are deleted upon exit from JOSM?
>
>
> I agree that purging old and particularly obsolete data in an image
> cache makes sense.  I also agree that it makes sense to initiate purging
> the cache without requiring the user to initiate the purge.
>
> However, I disagree that the image cache should always be automatically
> purged when exiting from JOSM.  What if the person restarts it right
> away, or next day, or next week, and wants to work on the same area they
> were previously working in?  In this case, the data in the image cache
> at the time of the exit is likely still useful, and it would be a waste
> of downloading time and network bandwidth to download it again.
>
> I also disagree that the image cache should always be purged without
> user intervention.  (I agree that this option should be available to be
> selected by the user, but it probably should not be the default.)  Maybe
> the user knowingly never wants the cache automatically purged, for
> whatever reason.  Maybe the user wants to know what's going on, and have
> some control as to how much is purged or kept.
>
> I think a better choice would be to have JOSM generate a notification
> upon exit when the cache is above some (potentially configurable) level,
> saying "The image cache is over N bytes / N files / has data over N days
> old -- would you like the oldest information over this limit purged?"
> Perhaps some sort of sliding scale configurator, showing how much is in
> the cache now and how much free space will be regained by deleting data
> more than a day / a week / a month / N days old.
>
...

Thanks for your reply. I agree with your suggestions, really, and 
thought about them myself. It's why I specified "exit" rather than 
"restart", for one thing. I just wanted to make things simple for the 
developers.

For myself, I was going to apply the equivalent of your policy by 
manually deleting the cache when I moved on to a new area.

Tom