[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] Zapped wtmp...

[From: Nils Faerber]

Hi!
I thought I should let you know...

I am not sure if I really found any cure to anything but after the
latest discussions about the size of wtmp I checked mine on the 770 and
found a more than 200MB file!

After gzip'ping it it shrank to just 5MB because it contains almost only
0s. But there must be the information for 200MB stored somewhere in the
JFFS2 so I guess that even if it only has 5MB as a comporessed file the
impact on a JFFS2 can be much worse.

So I enabled the R&D mode, became root and linked /var/log/wtmp to
/dev/null (who cares for this wtmp on the 770 anyway?).

Before I did this I saw more and more weird phenomena on the device,
like crashing browser and spurious power-offs when case closed (almost
100% battery, closed device one night, next morning it was powered off
and had to be rebooted!).

Now after I zapped wtmp I have the feeling (!) that it behaves much
better again! I can browse pages that before did not work and I hope
that the power-downs are history now too (for the last three days they
are but you never know).

Maybe someone else likes to try to this too and report his/her
experience here.

Probably wtmp should be linked to /dev/null in the next software release
too.

BTW: With every closure of the case the wtmp grows by about 3kB. You can
estimate with your usage how big it will get...

Cheers
  nils faerber

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