Deleted Solvers do not fully disappear / fill up quota

Hi there,

I've run into problems with my quota on StarExec, and the source of the problem seems to be the deletion process.

At this time, I can see 3 solvers in my personal space (and all its subspaces), but when I click on "Account", 5 solvers are displayed, and count towards my quota. However, on my account page, I can't delete/recycle any solvers, so I can't actually get rid of the difference. I can also not make them reappear, my recycle bin is displayed as empty.

For the record, the solvers in question (that only appear on my account page) have ids 1830 and 1837. I'm not sure how I arrived at this state, but I think I tried to remove the solvers and clicked on "delete directly" (or something) in the popup appearing after dragging them to the recycle bin.

Marc

Hi, Marc.

Did you go to the recycle bin (by clicking on it in the space explorer, or from your profile page) and select "empty solver bin"? This is what you have to do to delete a solver permanently and free up quota.

Aaron

Hi Aaron,

Yes, I tried that (I should have said so). I've tried it again now just to be sure, and it does not make a difference.

Marc

Hi, Marc.

I am hypothesizing that you removed the solvers from all spaces but did not actually recycle them. So they show up on your profile page and count towards your quota, but do not appear in your recycle bin (since, if I am right, they were not actually recycled). Indeed, looking in the db, they are not marked as recycled. So they are in, basically, an orphaned state.

I believe you should be able to go to the solver page (just click the link from the list of solvers on your profile page), then select "edit" from the actions, and then on the next page (for editing a solver) select "recycle" from the actions. I think this should send the solver to the recycle bin, from which you can truly delete it.

Let me know if this doesn't work.

Also, I am happy to increase your disk quota -- but I'd like to solve this problem first.

Aaron

Hi Aaron,

this worked, thanks. After recycling them on the Solver/Edit page, they popped up in the recycling bin, and I could remove them completely.

Thanks for the help,
Marc

Actually, a related question: On the User Account page, I noticed many (>2000) benchmarks that I thought I had removed. I do not want to keep them, but marking all of them and recycling them individually is not feasible. How can I just get rid of all of them?

Marc

mabrocks wrote:Actually, a related question: On the User Account page, I noticed many (>2000) benchmarks that I thought I had removed. I do not want to keep them, but marking all of them and recycling them individually is not feasible. How can I just get rid of all of them?

Marc

Hello,

Unfortunately, there is not really an easy way to do that right now. Since you bring it up, it would probably be nice to have the option to recycle all benchmarks or solvers that are not currently in any space. We should be able to have that implemented later this week.

Hi, Marc.

That one is a bit trickier, as currently we aren't providing an easy way to select or restore only your orphaned benchmarks (as Eric said while I was writing this).  I have tried now doing this directly in the db for you.  Please check your recycle bin and see if you see those 1992 orphaned benchmarks in the recycled benchmarks list.

Aaron

Admin wrote:
That one is a bit trickier, as currently we aren't providing an easy way to select or restore only your orphaned benchmarks (as Eric said while I was writing this).  I have tried now doing this directly in the db for you.  Please check your recycle bin and see if you see those 1992 orphaned benchmarks in the recycled benchmarks list.

The benchmarks are now gone, thanks.

Marc

Marc,

Just to confirm: do you see them in your recycle bin? It seems recycled/deleted benchmarks will not show up on your profile, but you will have to delete the recycled ones to reclaim quota.

Aaron

Hi Aaron,

you are right, they moved to my recycle bin. Oh god, this is all very confusing :-) I think I removed them completely now (and my used disk quota seems to support this claim).

It might be helpful to create a page that allows to show all files currently linked to a user / contributing to their quota (maybe even reporting the respective sizes), with a remove/recycle button on that page. I guess that in the long run, as people continue to use the platform, problems such as mine might become a recurring issue.

Anyway, thanks for the prompt help and all the work you put into this,
Marc

Hi, Marc.

Your suggestion sounds good, and we should be able to do that pretty easily. I think the confusion arises from the fact that we associate solvers and benchmarks with a unique owner, regardless of what spaces they are in. If a solver or benchmark is in no space but not recycled or deleted, then it is orphaned, and we don't have great support for working with orphaned primitives right now. We can improve that.

Aaron

> I think the confusion arises from ...

I think the confusion arises from using names "recycled/deleted/orphaned" for concepts
for which there is no immediate mental model - and neither comprehensive documentation
nor formal specification, and, it seems, no previous experience (on the user side,
but also on implementor's side, for building GUI/API).  

But star-exec is not the first operating(like) system that needs some quota mechanism.
Can you not copy the design of something that "just works" ... I think the UNIX file system model
is fine as it stands, and I assume it is well-known to the majority of star-exec users.
(And even for finer points, there is previous work, e.g., cited here  
https://starexec.forumotion.com/t97-no-recycling-for-things-that-are-still-referenced#260 )

Can you show me an actual use case of a "recycle bin"?
Who (what competition/community) requested this feature?
(Or was it implemented on a whim, by students who didn't have UNIX as their first OS :-)
Judging by the messages in these forums, it's certainly looks more confusing than helpful.

Sorry for the rant.

I think there's a basic rift in star-exec user experience: on the one hand, it's bare-bones UNIX
(you get a shell where the solver runs), on the other hand, it's some non-obvious GUI wizardry
for managing solvers and jobs. (Your API, star-exec-command, comes to the rescue
but it is still tied to the GUI (concepts) in more places than necessary.)

Perhaps now (with Vienna competitions being done) is a good time for a general evaluation
of star-exec features (and feature requests) by users (you wanted to send a questionnaire?),
(EDIT: questionnaire just received, thanks)
and a design process, with community involvement, for upcoming updates.
I think that right now, nothing is urgent, so we can actually discuss the design
before you rush (Eric) to implement it?

Star-exec usage might increase towards Christmas because of winter deadlines for summer conferences
(e.g., RTA, with a lot of termination papers traditionally).
We might need a more fine-grained job quota system by then ...

Best regards, and thanks for all the hard work, Johannes.

Hi, Johannes.

Thanks for the detailed thoughts about this. Just one quick reply for the moment: we added a recycle bin because one community organizer had the experience of accidentally deleting a sizable number of uploaded solvers. The recycle bin is -- just as on Mac and Windows computers -- a mechanism for helping prevent unintentional deletions. Yes, it is a little bit of a nuisance to have to empty the recycle bin to delete items truly from disk and reclaim quota. But again, this is not a new idiom: it works essentially the same way on Mac and Windows (I am a Linux user, but see the merits of this scheme).

A quick explanation of the three terms you mentioned:

-- recycled: a solver or benchmark is recycled if it has been moved to the recycle bin, which is the staging ground for deleting it permanently.

-- deleted: a solver or benchmark can be deleted from the recycle bin, at which point it is truly removed from disk and no longer counts towards quota.

-- orphaned: a solver or benchmark can become orphaned if it no longer appears in any space. Orphaned solvers and benchmarks can still be recycled from their "edit" pages. They can also be added back to spaces, but for this at the moment one would need to upload space XML creating a new space with the orphaned solvers or benchmarks in it (referencing them by their ids).

Yes, we definitely welcome further design feedback -- indeed, I just sent a questionnaire with a rather large number of questions to the Summer '14 competition organizers. Other feedback is also always very welcome.

Hope this helps,
Aaron