Log files and swap space

Dave Peticolas dave@krondo.com
Fri, 16 Feb 2001 00:18:44 -0800


Ronald Roth writes:
> Hello,
> 
> I am in the process of moving my bookkeepping from Emma to GnuCash. I've 
> noticed that each time I make a new entry in GnuCash, a little bit more swap
> space is used. After about 50 entries, my entire swap(80 M) is used up, and
> exitting GnuCash doesn't free up the space. My computer is essentially slowed
> to a swapping crawl until I restart X. Is this a memory leak in GnuCash? is
> there anything I can do to prevent this behavior? I have GnuCash 1.4.10 on
> RH 7.0 with Gnome.

Gnucash 1.4.x has a few small leaks, but nothing that would cause the
behavior you describe. There have been similar reports in that past
that were fixed by upgrading to the latest versions of gnome-libs.
You might also see if there are more recent versions of you XFree86
drivers.


> Also, after exiting GnuCash, my desktop is littered with files named
> "accounts.gnucash.20010215223111.log, accounts.gnucash.20010215224806.xac, 
> accounts.gnucash.b7183e08.15422.LNK" etc. What is the purpose of these files,
> and can I make GnuCash clean them up? or at least put them somewhere else?
> or perhaps not create them at all?

The .log files are a text record of the transactions you created.
Linas recently created a perl script to use them in case of a crash,
but it was created after 1.4.10 was released. The .LNK files are
part of the file locking process to ensure that more than one user
doesn't open a file at the same time. The *.xac files are backups
of your data. After exiting gnucash, you can delete all of them,
but you should keep around a few of the more recent backups for
safety.

dave